Power To The Meeple

You can say "Meep!" like this :



Or you can say "Meep!" like this :



You can say "Meep!" however you damn well please. Unless you're a student at Boston's Danvers High School.

Principal Thomas Murray has banned students from saying the word "Meep!" or wearing any item of clothing displaying the word "Meep!" He robocalled parents :

"Please be advised that any student who has the letters 'meep' on their clothing or uses the words verbally will face suspension from school...the police are monitoring this situation as well."

It appears some students may have been using "Meep!" as a form of psychological torture.

....students were using the word to taunt a specific teacher.

"Some kids would say it constantly," said student Kyle Sullivan.

"They would just walk by and just yell meep," said Allen.

Parents of students at the school are now trying to stop their children from communicating with each other using this already absurdly notorious four letter word.

WBZ reporter Christina Hager tried to contact

"principal Murray....the school commitee, the town administrator, and the superintendent of schools for comments, but all have refused."

A New York attorney heard about this surreal hilariously bizarre word ban and e-mailed the school's principal and administrators a message. The message?

"Meep"

They went a little crazy :

Yesterday I received a reply email from Assistant Principal Mark Strout, which said (in full) "Your E-mail has been forwarded to the Danvers Police Department."

Meep is an interesting word, not only because its childhood ingrained associations with Road Runner and Beaker.

According to the Urban Dictionary, 'Meep' has no clear meaning at all, which makes it a perfect word to be repeated endlessly, ceaselessly, by school students who want to fuck with their teachers' minds, and to drive parents and at least one school principal a bit bonkers as they try to stop the kids from saying "Meep!", all the while fearing the word has a secret meaning, or many meanings, sinister meanings, to the students who use it.

Urban Dictionary :

1. An exclamation akin to 'ouch' or 'uh oh..'
2. Filling in the blanks where other (rude) words would go.
3. A greeting! I personally say meep instead of Hello...
4. A random expression of happiness used to fill gaps in conversation.

Perhaps the principal of Danvers High is still a bit stressed about the last time his school hit the headlines :

More than 1,000 students were held in a Danvers High School gymnasium for more than two hours this morning after police locked down the school in response to threatening messages found on a bathroom wall, police and school officials said.

The school was dismissed without incident at 1 p.m., nearly an hour early and more than two hours after classroom evacuations began.

A group of local law enforcers who are part of the School Threat Assessment and Response System swept the building with dog units after two threatening messages, one on a wall and one in a stall, were found in a boys’ bathroom about 9:15 a.m.

The police would not give the Boston.com any details on what the "threatening messages" actually said.

Has the word "Meep" been freaking out this principal for more than a month?

UPDATE : US ABC News supplies a bit of background to how the meeping began :

Bob Thompson, a pop culture professor at Syracuse University, said he first heard students meep about a year ago during a class screening of a television show.

"Something happened and one of them said 'Meep,'" he said. "And then they all started doing it."

The meeps, he said, came from all of the students in the class in rapid-fire succession. When he asked them what that meant, they said it didn't really mean anything.

"It's almost like they look at you like it's a silly question," he said.

It was a silly question.

Danver school principal Thomas Murray told the Salem News :

"It has nothing to do with the word. It has to do with the conduct of the students. We wouldn't just ban a word just to ban a word."

I'm still betting the "threatening messages" that saw 1000 students confined to the gymnasium at the school in October contained the word 'Meep'.