La la la I can't hear you

A few days ago, a toddler playing near a lake was carried off and killed by an alligator. A few weeks ago, a toddler fell into the gorilla enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo and was rescued when zoo officials shot the gorilla. The public's very different reactions to the scenarios are puzzling.

While some in the media and online did shame the Graves family, who were allowing their child to wade in an artificial lake despite "No Swimming" signs, the family has received overwhelming support both online and in their community. And this is absolutely as it should be. There is nothing worse in this world than to lose a child. 

However, Michelle Gregg, mother of the boy who was nearly killed at the Cincinnati Zoo, was treated very different in the media and online. Despite the fact that, by all accounts, Gregg lost sight of her child for only a few seconds and had to be physically restrained from jumping into the enclosure after him, people tore her up online. Half a million people signed a petition to have her held criminally accountable even before all the details were out. 

Yesterday, I ran across this USA Today editorial opining on the differences between the two cases. It focused on the differences between gorillas and gators. A CNN story thought the difference was because of the venue. In fact, most of the stories that acknowledge the disproportionate response very carefully ignored the massive elephant in the room.

The Graves family are well-to-do. Pillars of the community. And white. Michelle Gregg and her son are black. 

Is it a race thing? Ranier Maningding writing for the Huffington Post makes a really compelling argument that it is. He points out

ALL OF THIS BULLSHIT is a way to disprove the humanity of Black parents — to prove that Black people aren’t responsible for themselves or their children. By doing this, we validate our legacy of oppression towards Black people.

I'm not sure how much is race and how much isn't. Maybe it's a gators vs. gorillas thing, maybe it's a venue thing - heck - maybe the massacre at Pulse has turned us into a more caring and compassionate people; at least for a news cycle or two.
But I find it just utterly bizarre that so many publications chose to completely ignore the racial element, even though so much of the cyber-bullying the Gregg family endured was overtly racist. Does white America just not see racism, or are we covering our eyes in the hopes that if we don't look at it it will cease to exist? 
Like, look at Charleston. After an openly white supremacist man made racist statements while killing black people in a black church, folks actually tried to argue this wasn't race-related. Why? What did anyone hope to accomplish by standing in the middle of a hurricane and swearing there is no such thing as rain. 
Is it a guilt thing? If we ignore the racism, we don't have to ignore our own culpability? Or maybe we think that if we acknowledge our privileges, someone will finally show up and take them away. Maybe we're afraid if we start seeing minorities as fully human, we'll drown in self-loathing for all the times we acted like they weren't. 
Or maybe we're just scared that, if minorities ever get out from under white America's thumb, they'll treat us just like we treated them. 

What we talk about when we talk about terrorism

I've seen a lot of stuff on Facebook about how the Left is all bleeding-hearted about radical Islam and refuses to blame radical Islam for the attack at Pulse Night Club, and it leaves me wondering if there's something of a breakdown in communication.

So first, let's talk about the words "radical Islamic terrorism." Obama refuses to use those words, which his opponents claim is because he doesn't want to acknowledge that terrorists follow Islam. However, here's how Obama explained the policy in a speech at the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism:

We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam... They try to portray themselves as religious leaders — holy warriors in defense of Islam. We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie. Nor should we grant these terrorists the religious legitimacy that they seek. They are not religious leaders. They’re terrorists.

We could debate the usefulness of this semantic tap dance in the face of a cabal of pure murderous evil, but what is not up for debate is the left's willingness to acknowledge the fact that terrorists like Omar Mateen embrace a radical form of Islam. We are all on the same page there.
I think that a lot of liberals, like me, are cautious in the way we talk about the radical Muslims behind terror attacks because most Americans don't seem to understand the difference between a radical Islamic terrorist and a person with brown skin. Every time an Islamic extremist carries out a terror attack, a spike in anti-Muslim hate crime follows, and the victims of those crimes are often not even Muslim.
I've also seen some memes on Facebook comparing the self-proclaimed Islamic State to Nazis, as if that's a case that needs to be made. I don't think that's a fair comparison. The so-called Islamic State seems significantly more evil to me, and much more dangerous. They have begun genocide campaigns against too many religious and ethnic groups to count. They torture and behead and rape and slaughter and force children to kill their families and inflict every evil imaginable on the innocent. Anyone on the Left who claims otherwise clearly hasn't read ISIS's own propaganda materials, in which they brag about doing just that.
However, some folks think that ISIS and Islam are the same thing. In fact, ISIS has declared that any Muslim who doesn't hold to their insane interpretation of scripture is an infidel who doesn't deserve to live. Most of ISIS's victims, in fact, have been other Muslims who belong to what it deems the wrong sects or ethnic groups.
Another mistaken belief I often see on Facebook is that Obama and the Democrats don't believe we should bomb ISIS. Actually, since 2014, America has carried out thousands of airstrikes against ISIS targets, killing about 26,000 ISIS fighters so far. The Left understands just how evil and dangerous ISIS is and they have taken action on this.

A great way to help ISIS out, if you're interested in doing so, is to lump all Muslims in with them. The vast majority of Muslims, especially Muslims in the United States, do not follow ISIS's interpretation of scripture and therefore deserve to suffer. And ISIS also knows that the more oppressed and marginalized Sunni Muslims feel, the more likely they are, like Omar Mateen, to become radicalized.
We all hate feeling powerless when tragedies like this occur. We think that hate and suspicion and retribution will make us feel safe again, but they won't. Hate can only beget more hate. You want to feel less powerless - have the audacity to love with all your heart. Speak out against hatred and bigotry. Stand up and speak even when you are quaking in fear. Love with all the fight left in your body. It seems like so little, but it is everything.

Hate is too great a burden to bear

This morning, failed presidential candidate Ted Cruz shared this heartwarming message of support to the LGBTQ community.

For all the Democrats who are loud champions of the gay and lesbian community whenever there is a culture battle waging, now is the opportunity to speak out against an ideology that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians... This is wrong, it is evil, and we must all stand against it. 

It's super touching that Ted Cruz is willing to speak out against violence against gays in a way that just happens to further his own political ends. I suppose this means he's sorry for that time a few months ago when he spoke at a convention organized by Kevin Swanson, who openly advocates, at every possible opportunity, the death penalty for gays.
Well I've got news for you, Ted Cruz. You can't drown us in your hate. 
"Love wins" wasn't just a slogan, it was a promise. The LGBTQ community and its allies have fought and died for the right to love. We will not fall to hate. 

Title is a quotation from MLK

The judge said “there is less moral culpability attached to the defendant, who is ... intoxicated,” when he sentenced rapist Brock Turner to six months in jail, of which he'll probably serve three. Brock Turner is less morally culpable because he was drunk; Brock Turner's victim is responsible for her rape because she was drunk.
Brock Turner will spend maybe ninety days in jail because he has no significant history of violence; Brock Turner's victim deserves what she got because she has a history of getting drunk and having sex.
Brock Turner doesn't deserve jail at all, according to his dad, for his twenty minutes of "action"; after Turner's twenty minutes of action, his victim spent an entire night being probed and prodded, swabbed, penetrated, interviewed, photographed. A night of pain and humiliation which led to a year and a half of hashing and rehashing while the world watched and the defense probed and prodded and swabbed and penetrated every corner of her life to prove she deserved what she got.
On the stand the defense grilled the victim about every minute and second of the night of her assault; the press published his swimming stats. 
The press unanimously agrees that the men who stopped the assault are heroes, and certainly they are. But I've yet to read an article that calls the victim a hero. We're more impressed by the fact that two men stopped to see if a woman was okay than we are that a woman gave up a year and a half of her life, and all her privacy while the world watched and shook their heads over Brock Turner's dashed Olympic dreams.

Brock Turner's a rapist - a reprehensible piece of absolute shit who deserves so much worse than he'll ever get. But what about the rest of us? What about the fathers who make excuses and the mothers who want to know what she thought was going to happen? What about those of us who tell women how lucky they were to not be raped or wonder how any woman could have been so stupid... to walk home alone, to leave her drink unattended, to trust this man or that man? 
This is one of those times I'm not particularly proud to be a human being. 

Here, I fixed his letter (changes in bold)... pic.twitter.com/qsa8TZWsPJ

— Ali Ozeri (@alexandraozeri) June 6, 2016

Alphabet soup

Once there was a part-time church janitor, Matt, who was very good at his job but happened to be illiterate. This became a problem when the church got a new pastor, who decided it was too big an inconvenience to give the janitor instructions verbally - he wanted to be able to give the janitor written instructions instead. Since Matt couldn't read, the pastor let him go. But Matt was a very good janitor. He soon started his own business - people don't care whether their plumber or roofer can read, only that he can do the job well and at a fair price. Soon the janitor had more work than he could handle, had to hire more employees, and before long was a very rich man. One day, a banker asked Matt to sign a contract, and Matt admitted, again, that he was illiterate. "Wow," said the banker, "you've accomplished so much. But think where you'd be if you'd learned to read." Matt replied "I'd be a part-time church janitor."
So that story might be a parable I heard in a sermon once, but here are a few real-life folks who didn't let illiteracy stop them from doing great things. 
Cherokee Indian Sequoyah, also known as George Guess, bears the distinction of being the only illiterate person known to have invented a written language. Until Sequoyah came along, Cherokee was a spoken language only. Sequoyah, a soldier for the U.S. in the early 1800s, saw white soldiers sending and receiving letters from their loved ones, and wished he and the other Cherokee soldiers could do the same. So he spent 12 years devising an 85-letter alphabet. He showed it to his tribal chiefs in 1821, and the alphabet was so simple and elegant that most members of the tribe had learned it within a year.
Incidentally, according to this account in John Lloyd and John Mitchinson's The Book of General Ignorance, Cherokee Indians don't call themselves Cherokee - they use the name Ani-Yunwiya. The word Cherokee might come from a Creek Indian word meaning people who speak another language or it might come from the Choctaw word for people who live in the mountains. 
Recently, scientists at London's ExCiteS Research Group realized that the Mbendjele hunter-gatherers of the Congo were way better at tracking the movements of animal populations and poaching activity in their rain forest, what with the fact that they live there and their survival depends on the ability to do so. So the groups have teamed up, using their combined resources to make the rain forest safer; the only stumbling block is that the Mbendjele don't have a written language. So scientists at ExCiteS have developed a mobile data collection app for cell phones and tablets that doesn't require reading or writing. So far, it's going great, and the names of non-literate scientists are starting to appear in scientific journal articles.
We all probably know a person or two who can only seem to write in text-speak. The way text-speak - or computer-mediated discourse as the linguists are calling it these days, makes this English major's skin crawl. It's just so horribly... wrong. Surely this trend is killing the English language as we know it, isn't it? The Christian Science Monitor once said of it:

As a dialect, text (“textese”?) is thin and unimaginative. It is bleak, bald, sad shorthand. Drab shrinktalk. The dialect has a few hieroglyphs (codes comprehensible only to initiates) and a range of face symbols. … Linguistically it’s all pig’s ear. … Texting is penmanship for illiterates.

Surely text-speak must make children less literate and inhibit their ability to communicate, right? So far, the research doesn't support that conclusion. Kids, on the whole, are quite adept at code switching - they generally know the contexts in which text-speak is appropriate and when it is not. In fact, computer mediated discourse actually seems to promote literacy. 

Appropriate appropriation?

I recently read Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, of which Neil Gaiman has said "I have no doubt that within a year it will both be winning awards and being banned." It's a semi-autobiographical coming of age story about a kid who lives on an Indian reservation but attends an all-white school outside of it. The book pulled me into this reality that is miles away from anything I've ever known, but that I could relate to on just about every level. I recommend this book so hard.
There's this scene in the end of the book, in which a character's grandmother has just died and pretty much the whole reservation shows up to mourn her. She was so beloved and well-known that they have to hold her memorial at the high school football stadium. People stand up and tell great stories as a tribute to her memory, but it's this one white guy, the narrator says, whose story was most important of all.
His name's Ted, and while he's not an Indian, he feels Indian in his soul (just like every other white person the narrator's ever met). Ted proceeds to give this long resume of all the ways he respects Native people, all the arrowheads and art and blankets in his collection. But the most beautiful item he owned by far, he said, was a powwow dance costume. The dance costume, he tearfully confessed, he knew had been stolen, and now he'd searched for ages to find the original owner - the very woman being mourned that day. 
Only they didn't belong to the grandmother at all. Ted didn't even have the right tribe. He'd shown up and derailed this old woman's funeral, made himself the center of attention, no doubt hoping for a big tearful display of forgiveness, and he was on the wrong damn reservation. 
And that's the first time I really understood the concept of cultural appropriation. I knew the term, of course, and I knew it was supposed to be bad, but I never actually got why it was. I mean, melting pot, right? And it's not like culture's a limited resource. It's not like tourist shops are in any danger of running out of dream catcher keychains.
But old white guy Ted made me get it. He wasn't just a pretender, he was a thief. He stole a funeral. He stole a family's grief. He paid money for a thing he didn't understand or have any right to own, and then he thought his crisis of conscience entitled him to steal glory away from a dead woman. This guy had everything, and the old woman, well, she'd lived her whole life in the shitty slum that was all that was left of her people's ancestral homeland. Yet he was the one stealing from her.
But I'm bordering on whitesplaining; lots of people of color have explained the concept better than me. 

But it's not just Native American culture that gets appropriated.

I do kind of take issue with some of what she says about hair. There are ancient Greek statues rocking dreadlocks*, and lots of cultures throughout the centuries have used intricate braids. The baby curls Katy Perry (who is, admittedly, an awful human being) got flack for wearing... my Irish grandmother called those spit curls, and she used to put them in my hair just like her mom had done for her. But Amandla Stenberg has a counter-point.

In my mind, the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange is respect. And I kind of think that if a person can't see the line between cultural exchange and perpetuation of offensive stereotypes, it's probably safest to just not go anywhere near the line. 
And if you're like me, and are still not really cool with anybody telling you what you can wear or do with your hair, some perspective might be useful: while we're indignant over being told what we can't wear, the American government still tells Native Americans they can't have running water - many reservations still lack the infrastructure to support it - in fact, a full 40% of Navajo Americans aren't able to get water in their damn homes. The government has also told Native Americans on reservations that they can't have adequately funded healthcare. Medical facilities on reservations are so drastically and shockingly underfunded that you get to live like, five years longer than Native Americans, on average.
Be mad about being told what you can't wear, but save your righteous indignation for stuff that matters.
      

* By the by, you know that viral video of a person of color attacking a white guy for having dreads? Please stop treating individual crazy people as representatives of their race as a whole. I once had a white lady (who happened to have schizophrenia) beat me up because I offered her a sandwich. This was not some white schizophrenic uprising aimed at oppressing people with sandwiches, it was one unstable lady being unstable. 

The half-blood princess

The Kindle app has this "popular highlights" feature, wherein you can see text that other Kindle users have highlighted. In academic books, this could be super useful. In the romance novels (aka Lady Porn) I consume like potato chips this allows for a new, weird form of voyeurism. 

It's weird to get that little glimpse inside the heads of the other folks who read this stuff - it's weird to hear what really turns them on. Like, you'd think people would highlight the filthy bits for future reference. That's what we're in it for, right? Only that's generally not the case. They highlight the lovey dovey crap. They highlight the sweet things the men say in the cuddling afterglow. The parts where the men assure them that their curves are sexy and that their imperfections only make them more perfect, or whatever. They highlight the funny bits, they highlight the bits they think are deep. In the Fifty Shades books, hundreds of other readers highlighted the wedding vows. Which I have to assume means that at least some of those readers actually used those wedding vows.

Which reminds me, random aside, of this interview I saw with the artist Sting. Sting wrote this song Every Breath You Take, which has lyrics like this:

Every breath you take and every move you make
Every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you
Every single day and every word you say
Every game you play, every night you stay, I'll be watching you

Oh, can't you see you belong to me
How my poor heart aches with every step you take

Some people think these lyrics are super romantic and super sexy.  Sane people think this song is super creepy and stalker-y. Which makes sense, since Sting wrote the song about the absolute nutter who was stalking him. There's an interview in which Sting talks about people who think the song is romantic. He says fans are always telling him how romantic the song is, and how many fans have told him that they'd used Every Step You Take in their wedding. Sting says whenever he hears that, he sort of cringes and thinks "ugh... good luck." But I digress as usual.
My 8th grade English teacher kept a little library of books at the back of the classroom, several of which were her college English books. I remember reading this book of Frost poetry one day, and her annotations in it. Isn't it funny the things we remember? I can't remember a single thing I learned in math in 8th grade, but I can remember precisely her tight penciled cursive in the lining of that book. Anyway, I remember in the poem Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, next to "Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though," she'd written God's house. Now, throughout my many years as an English major I've heard many interpretations of Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, including one surprisingly cogent essay arguing that the speaker of the poem is, in fact Santa Claus. But I don't remember anybody saying it was about God. It seems kind of like a Poetry 101 interpretation, honestly. 
Or I thought so, until just the other day that scribble popped into my head and I rethought it. Actually, Robert Frost had an interesting relationship with religion. His mom practiced a sort of mysticism called Swedenborgianism, which was quite obviously made up by the Muppets' Swedish Chef. 

Frost called himself an "Old Testament Christian," but rarely went to church or wrote about God. However, read through Frost's catalog, and you'll find his primary preoccupation to be nature, the natural world. Acquainted with the Night, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Road Not Taken - they all take place out of doors, immersed in creation. So it's not much of a leap to conclude that nature was Frost's church, that creation was what he held most sacred. And so it might well be that the line his house is in the village though is a cheeky little dig at the folks who think to find God inside a church inside a village, rather than out in the wilds of his creation. Or it might be that Robert Frost once trespassed in some guy's woods and wrote a poem about it. I tend to think that most poems are about what they are about, and that attempts to find secret meanings in great works of poetry are like dissecting a frog expecting to find Swedish fish inside. 
But how cool is it that a pencil scribble in a book you read more than 20 years ago can like, out of the blue give you a different understanding of a poem you've read a million times since? 

In college I always used to get to the bookstore early, in hopes of getting used books with the least amount of other people's crap in them. Now I kind of gravitate towards other people's highlights and scratches in the margin. How rare it is in real life to be able to read over another person's shoulder and hear what they're saying in their mind.

If only

I travel back 20 years sometimes, to find my teenage self. She was so thin, yet and half my current size, she believed herself morbidly obese. She spent all her daylight clowning and chattering, frantically hiding the misery that fell when everyone was asleep; the gasping and clutching of sleepless hours of panic and self-injury and the soothing plotting of the end of my life.
School's not easy with the screaming in your brain drowning out everything else. That's certainly not the only reason I was terrible at school; even with the benefit of drugs, I'm a world champion slack artist. Still, I've spent a lot of years wondering what if and what if and what if.

It's actually not that I'm not super happy with my life. I'm an English major with a job in her field - I'm living the dream. And if not for all the stumbles and falls, I'd have never met Jeremy. But haunted by the what ifs, I decided it was time.
This July I start in an MFA program at Ashland University. An MFA's not exactly the most practical thing to pursue, but it's not about finding a different job or making more money. It's about finding out what if.

Men are from Mars

Advice columns can be useful, such as a recent Dear Abby column that gives some great advice about how to not get yourself raped. 
See, this teenage virgin agreed to get together with a boy and study, and even though she was explicit about not wanting to have sex, he drove her to a secluded area and raped her. Well, she wasn't sure he'd raped her. One of her friends said he had and another said he hadn't, because she hadn't told him no forcefully enough. Luckily, Dear Abby was there to break the tie - see, the guy decided to have sex with her against her will because of a miscommunication. See he interpreted Uncertain in Illinois' willingness to make out as an invitation to shove his penis into her and keep going when she told him it hurt and begged him to stop. Uncertain's folks should have talked with her about the dangers of her irresponsible behaviors. Luckily, Abby had some advice: go to the police. Just kidding, Uncertain should go see the school shrink.
But I wonder if Abby's attitude toward rape - a lot of people's attitudes about what constitutes rape - aren't due to something of a "miscommunication." 
The minute boys are born we start telling them how their worth is defined by their ability to get women. From birth they're ladykillers and heart breakers. Stores sell baby clothes that say things like Lock up your daughters and I'm here to steal your girl, and Ladies, I have arrived. We live in a world where many different manufacturers are willing to make and sell clothing that declares your infant boy a pimp.

But then on the other hand, we tell girls just the opposite from birth. We joke that infant girls will have to beat the boys off with a stick, but that their dads will have to lock them up when they're older. Young girls must be pretty to have worth, but they must not wear clothing that's "distracting" to the boys. We teach girls that a good girl keeps her legs together, doesn't send out "confusing" signals, and that their parents will protect their virtue with violence if need be. Girls who remain virgins are good girls and we praise them for it.
Boys who have sex with a lot of partners are players; women who do are sluts. Average-looking men who pursue women relentlessly are pickup artists; women who do are swamp donkeys and slam pigs (except for average looking girls under 13, who are slampiglets and I do not want to live on this planet anymore).  
So we've set up this situation where a male's worth rests in his ability to have sex, and a woman's worth rests in her refusal to have it. 
But does that cognitive dissonance make rapists of men who otherwise wouldn't be? That sounds a bit like making excuses. And surely rapists are horrible monsters, a species apart from we decent human beings, right? I'm not so sure. Repeated studies over the course of decades have found that otherwise normal people will usually perform actions that they believe to be morally wrong - up to and including murder - if an authority figure tells them to. So if society tells men over and over that they have to have sex with women in order to have worth, maybe they start to think that no doesn't have to mean no. It's not an excuse - not in the case of those experiments and not in the case of rapists. But maybe society deserves a slice of the blame too.   
And another thing. We say rape and sexual violence are wrong, but the language we use when it comes to boys and sex is pretty violent. From the moment they're born, we tell them they're ladykillers and heart breakers. Women make love, but men bang and nail and hammer and screw and plow and pound and bag her and hit that. 
But those are just words, words that nobody actually takes literally. Surely they couldn't make people think rape's okay, right? Well not according to Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University. In their paper "Metaphors We Think With: The Role of Metaphor in Reasoning," they posit that the metaphors we use can shape our actions. In one experiment, they asked people to propose a solution to crime in the city of Addison. The facts they gave to each group were the same, but the metaphors they used were different - one group was asked to imagine crime as a virus infecting the city, while subjects in the other group were asked to imagine it as a beast ravaging the city. The people who got the virus metaphor were more likely to focus on prevention and rehabilitation, where people who got the beast metaphor advocated stepping up law enforcement and delivering more severe punishments. So maybe using violent language when we talk about sex influences folks to see sex and violence as things that go together. 
Maybe. I don't know. Despite all this research, I can't really believe that decent people will do horrible things under the right conditions. I'm far from a moral absolutist, but I really believe that people who torture others are bad people, regardless of their reasoning; I'm not comfortable with the idea that most people become, by that definition, bad people if someone in a white coat tells them to be. 

Under the wire and out of steam

I've always found the expression you can't judge a book by its cover funny, because that's kind of how bookstores work. Between the title, author, critic quotations, illustrations, and blurbs, you may not be able to tell everything about a book from its cover, it's certainly a good place to start.

Gary Busey is one book you can
most certainly judge by its cover.

Of course, when the phrase first got popular, in mid-eighteen hundreds according to KnowYourPhrase.com, books had a lot less information on their covers. And yet, according to the Google Books Ngram viewer, the phrase is more popular in print than ever. But don't judge a book by its cover isn't the only popular phrase coined in a very different time.

With a face like this, what was
Martin Shkreli gonna do? Join the
Peace Corps?

It's your dime comes from when pay phones existed, and calls from such dinosaurs cost a dime. Mattresses aren't made from sacks of hay anymore, but we still hit they hay or hit the sack when we're tired. People who stay up late these days tend to prefer electric lighting, but they're still said to burn the midnight oil. Carnivals tend not to give out tobacco products as prizes anymore, but we still say close but no cigar. We don't use steam to power our vehicles anymore, yet when we're tired, we say we've run out of it. We left behind the human-limb-based economy at least a decade ago, but things still cost an arm and a leg. 

Robert Durst may have accidentally
confessed to murder back in 2015,
but the cold dead eyes have been
confessing his sins all along.

Riding shotgun refers to the guy on a stagecoach whose job it was to deter highway robbery. The practice dates back to the 1800s, at least, the the expression, according to PhraseFinder.org, is 20th century. We're not sure who coined the term - it appeared to have been around a while when it first appeared in print back in 1920. The old Westerns popularized the term, and by the 1950s, kids were using the term to refer to riding in the front seat of the family car. The term peaked in popularity back in the '60s, but it's still in wide use today.