The Story of the Word Moist

It all starts off in a little town not too far out of Chicago called Schaumburg. it's a middle sized town with middle class people, in the middle of the United States. so it's a pretty mediocre town. There are a lot of mediocre people.

Among us, our group of friends don't understand mainstream people and the stupid things they do sometimes. Like wearing visors upside-down and backwards. Why do people do this? It's the dumbest thing we could think of doing with a visor. Or putting racing stripes on cars that have as much horsepower as our lawnmowers. We thought about putting racing stripes on our lawnmowers and snowblowers, but we decided it was a waste of time and money.

Anyway, another odd trend that, as obvious out casts of mainstream society, we don't understand is the use of words that make no sense. i.e. "Damn that car is TIGHT." In the previous sentence, the word 'tight' is used as some sort of positive adjective. Now, don't get us wrong. We are aware that a car can be tight, but doesn't that require the speaker to wear the car? And if you have 'tight' clothing, that usually means that the person is either a) gaining weight or b) shrinking clothes in the laundry. Either way, the situation isn't good.

So one person (We'll call him "Danny")(actually that is his real name) decided to take a crack at making up his own words that make no sense. After careful crafting and brainstorming, he decided that 'moist' would be a suitable replacement for the words 'cool' and 'awesome'. i.e. "Wow, that car is so MOIST." Now normally the previous sentence would refer to a wet car. But now it refers to a 'cool' or 'awesome' or even 'tight' car.

Initially it had some problems getting off the ground. People had problems adapting their vocabulary to the new word. Others didn't understand it. Girls think it's dirty (which is not and will never be the intent of the word). Eventually, after the original users of the word(our group of friends) undertook a rigorous course in using the word in every possible situation, it became second nature to us. What used to be 'cool' or 'awesome' or 'Phat' or 'tight' was now 'moist'.

Now the hardest part of our contribution to mainstream vocabulary took place: adding it to mainstream vocabulary. People thought it sounded stupid. "Moist? that's dumb" and of course our response was "Well so was 'Titanic', but you liked that." People agreed. Others (mostly of the female breed) thought "Moist, that's so dirty." and of course our response was "Well, so are monkeys, but everyone thinks those are cute." Others agreed.

So we all tried our ways of spreading the good word. At first we tried subliminal messages that we hoped would just get the word in people's heads. When people would ask how we were doing we'd reply something like, "(moist) very (moist) good (moist). How (moist) about (moist) you? (moist)". Needless to say, it wasn't very long before people caught on to our ploy. But that made it easier to implement step two.

Step two wasn't really planned, it was more of a spectacular accident. People would just make fun of us for using the word 'moist' as a substitute for 'cool' and 'awesome'. But what these naysayers didn't realize is that they were getting used to using the word in it's correct context. For instance, if there was a person at lunch that wasn't clued in yet to our word (yes, it did happen), and they would say something like "Wow, these French Fries are the best", someone would turn to one of us true believers and say "Hey, are the French Fries MOIST?!" in those 5 seconds, an unstoppable force was set into motion: The person who was making fun of us for using the word was actually adopting it. They may not have thought so at first, but eventually, it would be stuck in their vocabulary as it is for most people to automatically respond to explosions in movies as "AWESOME!"

Once we distributed the word 'moist' to our immediate market, we came to the conclusion that if we didn't start to expand our goals, the word would go nowhere. So we needed a way to spread the word across the United States and eventually beyond that. So again, we sat down and thought, "hmmm, how do all these dumb and popular words get started anyway?" Then it hit us: Rap music and MTV. If a rapper says he's gonna "pop a cap in yo' ass then smack around his phat bitches." He just popularized (to kind of make up another word if you will) two of the dumbest phrases that a person could "shout out to all his/her friends back in Deleware."

So we decided that we needed a rapper to say 'moist' in context in a song and we'd be in the clear. But that was a problem: We live in Schaumburg, Illinois. The only rappers here are the people that think they are 'ghetto' but they really live in two story houses and drive their parents cars to Abercrombie in Woodfield Mall and use a credit card to pay for all their crappy clothes (don't even get us started on Abercrombie). This was our biggest skunk in the road yet.

Well to make a long story short, we did alright in spreading the word. We are still trying, but it's slowed down a bit. Danny did a good job of spreading the word around the campus of Bradley University. That's a lot of people. And college kids are the leaders of tomorrow. The rest of us did our best to spread the word where ever we went. Somehow it got to the dormitory halls of Marquette University in Wisconsin. That's not bad. And the rest of us pretty much beat it into the minds of all the students at Schaumburg High School. As for getting a rapper to say it, we got the next best thing: A local punk band. Apparently Lucky Boy's Confusion used it when they went on tour sometime over the winter or something. We wish we could have seen it. It would have brought tears to all of our little eyes...

And that's our story of the word 'moist' according to us (and if you so cared that much, a brief explaination of why we hate Abercrombie and Fitch). We hope this page was informative, entertaining, and enlightening at the same time.

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