SHAKE IT OFF
‘Twerking’ predates Miley Cyrus — by about 200 years.
The first time Miley Cyrus acquainted us all with the sight of her twerking behind more than two years ago, people could barely contain their hysteria. Half of her critics considered the dance scandalous and hyper-sexual; the other half were frustrated she had claimed ownership of a dance that had existed in black culture for years. Everyone was annoyed by the word, but no one would stop using it.
But Mary Shelley, acclaimed author of “Frankenstein” and paragon of classic literature, would merely have shrugged. She had been talking about “twerking” nearly two centuries earlier.
That’s according to editors at the Oxford English Dictionary, who announced Thursday that the word that has alternately been made into a shorthand for the appropriation of culture and the decline of all mankind would not only be entering the dictionary but that its use goes back far longer than any of us had ever considered. All the way to 1820, to none other than Shelley.
True to form, the first use was mildly derogatory.
“Really the Germans do allow themselves such twists and twerks of the pen,” her stepbrother Charles Clairmont wrote in a letter to Shelley, complaining of German’s sloppy handwriting.
The word appeared as a verb about 20 years later, an amalgam of “twist” and “jerk,” with overtones of “work” mixed in.
“And it never really went away after that,” Fiona McPherson, a senior editor for the OED, told The Washington Post.
In researching the word’s etymology, McPherson found it in novels and newspapers and high-brow literary journals. It even graced the pages of The Washington Post, in a 1952 article about the arrival of the Eisenhower administration and its impact on the D.C. social scene.
“Washington cliff-dwellers are twittering, twerk-ing, and titillating,” the story began. “There is nothing they love more than a change of administrations, and since most of them are Republicans anyway, they are preening their social feathers, whetting their social axes, and getting ready for the Eisenhower administration as if it was to be the first rain after a 20-year drought on the social Sahara of Washington.”
Clearly, “twerking” is not the only thing that hasn’t changed in the past five decades.
It is worth noting that the dance we now refer to as “twerking” evolved entirely separately of the term — it has a long, complex history in West African culture that predates even venerable Mrs. Shelley.
The dance and the word first coalesced in 1993, according to McPherson, in the song “Do The Jubilee All” by New Orleans rapper DJ Jubilee. It appeared in a New Orleans TimesPicayune story three years later, in an article talking about the dance. For more than a decade, “twerking” flourished in hip hop music videos and on Urban Dictionary. Then Cyrus adopted the dance, and the whole Internet went wild.
When asked if there was a certain satisfaction in uncovering a storied history for a word that has been so thoroughly maligned, McPherson demurred.
“We have to look at it completely dispassionately,” she said, with scholarly discretion. “Has this word reached a general level of currency? Has it has made a mark on the language? If the answer is yes, then we add it (to the OED).”