Ginkers

A few days ago Jeff wrote about a piece of local slang from his high school, specifically the word "rant" to describe a woman. Anyone who went to my high school would immediately think of the word "ginker" upon reading that. "Ginker" was a term unique to my town, although ginkers were everywhere in New Jersey during the 1980s. I have no idea why they were called that. You probably called them burnouts -- they were heavy-metal listeners who drove sleazy cars and had chain wallets and denim jackets. They might have smoked pot on ths bus, or made out with big-haired metal chicks against the lockers. (Actually the girls were ginkers too, or maybe "ginkettes".) Sometimes you would even see a ginker-in-training in the eighth or ninth grade. Other times some normal kid would come back from summer vacation in full ginker mode. Ginkerdom had a strange allure.

A kid named Andy was probably the biggest ginker of them all, at least in the class of '89. Nice guy, actually. Quite friendly. He wrote the names of a bunch of metal bands on the cover of one of my textbooks one time in ninth grade. (For the rest of the year people wondered why I seemed to be a fan of Celtic Frost.) I vividly remember him disrupting an assembly in the school auditorium one morning. The school had brought in a rock band -- probably a Christian rock band -- to tell us not to use drugs. (I am somewhat embarrassed to remember that they were called The Edge.) All Andy did was climb onto the stage and start clapping along with the band as he walked across in front of them, to the delight of the entire junior class. They suspended Andy from school for that. If another kid had done it, the deed wouldn't have drawn such a stiff punishment, but because of who he was, it was clear he was making a mockery of The Edge's well-meaning but completely ineffective performance.

The only other thing I know about Andy is that he was on America's Funniest Home Videos a couple of years later. He was on the custodial staff of the public library at the time, and he was caught rocking out by the security cameras as he vacuumed the reference section.

Anyway I bring this up because I located an Urban Dictionary citation for "ginker" the other day, after Jeff invited comments about local slang. In the three days since I linked to that page in the comments section of Jeff's blog, someone has posted a very lengthy and hilariously accurate definition of "ginker". It's currently definition #4, but it may rise in the rankings as people give it the thumbs-up. I'd love to take credit for the posting, but I didn't write it, and neither did my brother, class of '86. (The "Ginkovitz" thing is clearly fictitious, although the writer had me going there for a moment.)

The farther my high-school experience slips into the past, the funnier New Jersey in the late 1980s looks. Could it really have been like that? Were those people real?


FMFM: Quincy Jones' The Quintessence, on what is probably the thickest, nicest piece of vinyl I've ever owned. This one's from his era of more traditional big-band orchestration, although I've been digging the funkier, weirder Gula Matari and especially Walking In Space lately too.