Title: The Lone Pine Greeting
General Information about Item:
- Customary, Practical Joke, Gesture
- Language: English
- Country of Origin: United States
- Informant: Will Bednarz
- Date Collected: This data was collected on November 4th, 2018 during a one-on-one interview at the Russell Sage dormitory with Will Bednarz.
Informant Data:
- Will Bednarz ‘20 is a male student studying Government at Dartmouth College. He is originally from Larkspur, California. Will participated in a hiking trip before the start of his Freshman year at Dartmouth as part of the First Year Trips DOC program. Will is of Irish descent and has distant family who attended Dartmouth, but he knew little about Dartmouth before arriving for First Year Trips.
Contextual Data:
- Social Context
- Will encountered this prank/gesture first when he was a tripee during August of 2016. Will noted that his trip leaders played many pranks on them such as this one, but that this was one of the funniest and most treasured amongst Dartmouth students.
- This joke is typically played by upperclassmen or students leading trips on their first year tripees. As the objects of the prank, the new freshmen are supposed to be initiated and bonded together as a new class by going through the embarrassment of this prank together.
- Cultural Context
- This joke occurs on first year trips, which close to 95% of every incoming class at Dartmouth College participates in. Trips are used as a way to welcome each new class to Dartmouth and to break down whatever misconceptions they might have. Accordingly, jokes on trips are used often as they offer a great way to subvert expectations and to make everyone have a good time. Typically, the practical joke is played once the members of the trip and the leaders have left Dartmouth’s campus and are together somewhere in the surrounding wilderness of New Hampshire/Vermont. In this way, practical jokes like this one are very common to the Trips setting as they serve to bring everyone closer together through group humiliation/embarrassment.
Item:
Trip leaders signal back and forth to each other and between trips by raising two fingers on either hand together and crossing their thumb. They refer to this as “Lone Pine Greeting.” Trip leaders prank their tripees by leading them to believe that this is a common way of greeting individuals on Dartmouth’s campus and encourage them to use the signal throughout the duration of trips. In reality, no one actually does this at Dartmouth, and the signal means nothing.
Transcript:
- Jackson: Could you state your name and background please?
- Will: My name is Will Bednarz. I am a ’20, and I’m studying government here at Dartmouth College.
- Jackson: Where are you from? Did you know anything about Dartmouth trips before going?
- Will: I’m from Larkspur, California. I have a couple of older cousins who went here, but I didn’t really know anything else about the school or trips aside from my connection to them.
- Jackson: Were there any pranks that your trip leaders played on you when you were on trips?
- Will: Yeah, actually there were a lot. I remember one of the funniest pranks was this weird gesture that they made us all do to each other. Our trip leaders would greet each other by putting their hands in the air with both fingers raised and their thumbs like *this*. They made all of us catch on to it as a friendly way to wave and say hello to each other, and it really caught on. At the end of the trip, when we got back to campus finally, they told us the gesture was totally made up, and I felt really stupid.
Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):
Image file
Informant’s Comments:
· “I looked so stupid doing this. I can’t believe I ever thought this was a real thing.”
Collectors’ Comments:
· This gesture based prank seems like a hilarious way to develop something within a small group of people that only they share. Looking back, Will seemed to fondly recall the mutual humiliation of realizing that the sign wasn’t a real thing that people do at Dartmouth.
Collector’s Name: Jackson Baur
Tags/Keywords:
- Joke. Pranks. Practical Jokes. Trips. Dartmouth. Gesture.