One Person's "Meep!" Is Another's Poison

Photo by jen light; used under CC license

If you’re a Muppet lab assistant or a cartoon bird pursued by a hapless coyote, you are no longer welcome at Danvers High School in Massachusetts. Or, at least, you’d better keep your mouth shut if you visit, because the school’s principal seems to think that “meep” is murder. Or something like that.

Because he has, we must assume, fixed every other problem his school has, Principal Thomas Murray has decided that the “meep” market his school is turning into must end. Afraid of a “meep” ball of sorts disrupting the school, Principal Murray sent out an automated call to parents warning that suspensions could result if the students did not immediately become “meep”-deprived.

One wonders if Principal Murray considered how utterly ridiculous he would look if the story hit the media. One also wonders if he considered the likely effect his warnings would have on a student body composed of teenagers. What, really, is to stop them from simply switching to a different nonsense word? Possibly he doesn’t realize how quickly information can spread among a teenage population these days — if they have cell phones and thumbs for texting, it’s not as though they need to have organizational meepings. It does appear that Murray’s actions were successful, at least in the short term; but in the long term it may come back to bite him. Let’s hope it at least doesn’t lead to a witch-hunt for the organizers; Danvers has had some… bad experiences with those before.

While we at GeekDad would certainly never advocate disrupting a school, we nonetheless think the principal’s warning sounds awfully like a challenge. We would like to suggest a few possible substitutes, as “meep” tenderizers if you will: “Ni!” is a fine and wonderful classic, and considerably easier to remember than “Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing Zow Zing”; “Spoooon!” might work nicely, or perhaps “Zoinks!“; or, if you want to stick with Muppet-related cries, you can’t go wrong with “Bork bork bork!“

Any other suggestions for the students now “meep”-less in Seattle Danvers? Please leave a comment.

(Incidentally, just because we’re geeks, we should mention that there is always the possibility the students latched onto “meep” due to Phineas and Ferb. But they would seem to be too old for the show’s younger demographic, and too young for its older demographic.)