Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language: the dark side of squee

issue 14 September 2013

Oxford Dictionaries have been adding some rather silly words to their online resources, such as phablet (‘a smartphone with a large screen’, a portmanteau word, from phone and tablet) or jorts (‘jean shorts’, another portmanteau word). I can’t see much future in them, nor could I in squee, until I had a conversation with Veronica.

Squee is an exclamation of delight, or the related noun or verb. I mentioned to Veronica that it reminded me of Mr Smee, the genial pirate in Peter Pan, ‘a man who stabbed without offence’, as Barrie chillingly puts it. Veronica explained that Squee was a character too, who originally appeared in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, a darkly misanthropic comic-book series by Jhonen Vasquez that began to appear in 1995.

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