Friday, July 14, 2006

Punks in Trunks

An award-winning local newspaper columnist says there's a new trend among kids that has the cops baffled: riding around in the trunks of cars:

When the half-dozen teens in the car told the Camp Hill police they had been trunking, they were met with the equivalent of a blank stare.

"It was absolutely new to me and to mine," said Camp Hill Police Chief Gregory Jan Ammons.

The chief said he asked cops who are the parents of teen-age kids if they were familiar with the term, or the practice.

No deal.

And he seemed a bit relieved when I told him that a spokeswoman for the state police also was unfamiliar with trunking.

But it's well-known enough in some circles to have landed on a Web site called urbandictionary.com...

The site defines trunking as "the latest craze amongst American teens when there are too many bodies to conventionally fit inside a car -- the extras go into the car trunk."

It's not new, and I've gotta give props to the original duo who popularized it:

This is obviously just another example of hipster kids picking up on a retro 1970s fad.

2 comments:

D.B. Echo said...

This was an ancient way of sneaking people into those old-fashioned public displays of DVD precursors known as "drive-in moving pictures." There's an extended Cheech and Chong routine that involves them sneaking a bunch of guys into a drive-in in the airtight trunk of a car, and then getting high (or stoned, or both) and forgetting about them (but not before Cheech relieves himself all over the outside of the trunk). After the movies our heroes go driving around, and eventually the muffled pleas and banging die down, and they forget about their excess baggage entirely.

I wonder if trunking will make kids less likely to be rear-ended? As Larry Niven says, think of it as evolution in action.

Anonymous said...

Got a lovely phone message from a woman who said the term should not have been defined in an urban dictionary but at dumbwhitekids.com.
Had to chuckle at that one.