A beg is a people-pleaser. It’s defined in the Urban Dictionary as a ‘suck-up’.
The word ‘beg’ started being used by young people in about 2010. I first became aware of the term two years ago when I was accused of ‘begging it’ by my 16-year-old daughter. I had laughed at a man’s unfunny and oft-repeated joke, and she knew I was doing it because I was about to ask him a favour.
For a young person, a classic example of a ‘beg’ would be someone who ‘double-messages’. A girl can initiate communication with a boy she likes by sending him a message. But if she sends a second message before the boy responds, that constitutes ‘begging it’ in the extreme.
Were I to use slang around a young person, I’d be perceived as the ultimate ‘beg’. I’d be an oldie committing the crime of being desperate to appear hip, muscle in and be accepted.
Still, there is no reason we oldies can’t use this exquisitely accurate little word amongst ourselves. The other day, a friend in her sixties was describing the lengths her on-off boyfriend had gone to in order to reignite her waning interest. He’d wangled an invitation to an event where she was chairing a panel, and travelled hundreds of miles to it, on the pretext that he was interested in the panel’s subject matter.
‘What a beg,’ I said, and my friend immediately grasped that this was exactly the way to describe the situation.
Another friend received five lengthy texts from a woman, declaring her attraction to him, even though she knew he was married. She justified her forwardness by adding, ‘I just can’t help it!’ Now that’s begging it.
A boy who constantly texts a girl is likely to be considered a persistent romantic or a pest, depending on whether his advances are welcome. But a girl is still expected to play hard to get or be demoted to a ‘beg’. Rules for the young are as rigid as ever.
Strangely, we start ‘begging it’ more as we age, on the self-deceiving grounds that we’re grown-up enough to stop playing games and start communicating sensibly. In fact, it behoves oldie women to stay very cool indeed, given that older men find ‘begs’ repellently pathetic.
Yet be cool in the wrong way, and you’re also ‘begging it’. The young are far more confrontational than we are, and ready to challenge bad behaviour. One girlfriend was subjected to two years of hurtful negligent arrogance by her boyfriend. Yet she continued to tiptoe around him, keeping her diary empty just in case he deigned to include her in his plans. The less she berated him, the more of a ‘beg’ she was and the more carelessly he treated her.
We should be grateful to the young for pinpointing the error of our people-pleasing with this precise little word, armoured by its hard consonants.
Though the word ‘sycophant’ has a nice onomatopoeic serpentine slither, nothing packs a punch quite like the brutally economic ‘beg’. I am delighted to have discovered and adopted it.
Charlotte Metcalf
