General Information:

         Verbal Lore, Slang

         Language: English

         Country of Origin: United States

         Informant: JC ’24

         Date Collected: 11/2/2021

         Location Collected: First Floor Baker Library

Informant Data: JC is a ’24 at Dartmouth College, and is a 21 year old male from Singapore. He is a sophomore at Dartmouth college, and is not an athlete. He is a Economics major.

Contextual Data:

Social Context: I collected this information and word from Jihwan on the first floor of Baker library. NARP is used to delineate a social divide on campus between athletes and non-athletes. It is often a key piece of information used to describe someone. It can cause divides in social settings such as greek life, as athletes tend to belong to certain fraternities and sororities and narps belong mostly to others.It can be used with both a negative or positive connotation, depending on the situation. Some people are very proud to be narps, while occasionally athletes look down on narps and use the word in a mean way.

Cultural Context: Dartmouth students often shorten words or phrases to make them easier to remember and create a more unique culture. Non-athlete is an awkward way to refer to someone, so the word NARP was created to make things easier. Given the unusually high percentage of Dartmouth students that are athletes, this term is useful when talking about people on campus.

Item: NARP (Non-Athletic Regular Person): Example: “Joe used to play on the soccer team but he quit, so now he is a narp.”

Associated File:

“NARP stands for non-athletic regular person, so its like anyone who’s not an athlete.”

“I learned it freshman year because a couple guys on my floor were athletes, and some older guys referred to other people on our floor using this word”.

Informant’s Comments: JC said he was asked if he was a narp fairly frequently during his first few weeks at Dartmouth. He also noted that the word fosters a sense of division between athletes and non-athletes that can be seen in various social situations.

Collector’s Comments: This term was created as an easy way to refer to non-athletes. It is an abbreviation and thus is more efficient and easy to remember. I don’t frequently use this word, but when I do I use the word to describe individuals or friend groups.

Collector’s Name: Ben Ryan