THE SLANG:
“Simp”
THE STORY:
Students last year explained to me that a “simp” is a guy who is so in love with a girl that nothing else matters. I immediately had a few concerns.
First of all, it struck me as cruel to denigrate someone who has had the fortune/misfortune to have been struck (hard) by Cupid’s arrow. I mean, hormones are involved, and infatuation; it’s difficult to control how you feel, especially when your feelings are that big. I chatted about the word with some seniors more recently and they helped me refine my understanding. I’d told them about how when I was dating a girl in high school we were spending so much time together that my guy friends said I was forgetting about them. But the seniors said that you mainly use simp to describe a guy who is completely infatuated with a girl who’s not into him. He might be on the phone with her for hours, even though she’s never going to date him. Here, too, I could sadly relate, having spent many hours in college with women I was crushing on but who enjoyed my friendship and wanted to keep things that way.
Second, I expressed a concern to the seniors that there seemed to be an underlying misogyny to the word. After all, doesn’t the word imply that women are only worth hanging out with if you’re dating them? But they said it could be used to describe anyone, regardless of gender, who is so swept out to sea with their feelings that you just want to say to them, “You’re embarrassing yourself.”
A whole lot of poetry, songs, books, and movies have been written about the all-consuming love we feel for someone who doesn’t love us back. John Cusack stood outside Ione Skye’s house in “Say Anything,” holding up a boombox, and while that romantic gesture has been reinterpreted as stalking, my high school self went to the movie theater three times to watch Lloyd Dobler tear his own heart out with love. There is a nobility to this futile pursuit, and I suppose also a kind of vanity, for without reciprocation, the passion exists, in a sense, only for the sake of the one who is feeling it.
Look. Sometimes it takes a while for a hopeless romantic to let go of their dream, and sometimes we need to help our friends learn to let go by giving them a bit of tough love, but do we really want to blame and shame the victim?
I do wonder if the word simp is used as a kind of charm against the spirits of infatuation, a kind of “There but for the grace of Aphrodite go I.” We say, “You’re embarrassing yourself!” but maybe what we’re thinking is, “Better you than me.”
We use the word until we’re the ones holding up the boombox.
THE “RESEARCH”: Dictionary.com says simp is a slang insult for men who are seen as too attentive and submissive to women from whom they have no hope of winning affection. The entry points out that the word has been criticized for demeaning certain men as weak-willed and emotional and for implying that women are manipulative objects whose value is limited to what they can offer men. The origin of the term is attributed variously to a crude acronym, hip-hop lyrics, and the abbreviation of simpleton. Apparently, in 2019, there was a TikTok trend called “Simp Nation” where young men posted videos “describing allegedly stereotypical behaviors of a simp, like comforting his girlfriend or buying dinner and not getting repaid” in an acceptable manner. Some on the internet have pushed back, saying that “having feelings, crying, caring about someone, ‘simping’ as you guys like to call it, etc. does not make you less of a man.”
As always, your usage may vary.
