Title: Layup

General Information:

         Verbal Lore, Slang

         Language: English

         Country of Origin: United States

         Informants: Alex Misiaszek

         Date Collected: November 5th, 2021

         Location Collected: McCullouch Hall, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Informant Data: 

Alex Misiaszek is a member of the Dartmouth Class of 2025 studying Biology on a pre-Medical Track. He is from McLean, Virginia, but now lives in Charleston, South Carolina. His main campus involvement used to be the Division 1 Swimming Team, but he has recently stepped back from it.

Contextual Data:

Social Context: I collected this folklore in the McCullouch at Dartmouth College. The informant said that he learned this word while selecting classes from friends, and that they learned it from upperclassmen. This word is known by virtually all Dartmouth Students

Cultural Context: Dartmouth is known for being a very academically challenging school. Therefore, students try to lighten their course load by taking less academically demanding or work intensive courses, called “layups.” Students who are taking two other difficult classes in a term will often be on the hunt for a layup.

Item: Layup; definition: A conceptually easy, low-workload course that people tend to take when they are in other difficult classes; example: “I’m taking COSC 50 and ECON 20 next term, I’m really going to need a layup”

Informant’s Comments: The informant said that his Writing 5 class, which is a class that all first year students need to take, was a layup. He is in an honors biology class, so he said he chose this layup so that he could have more time to do other things. He said that this word comes from basketball, and “Like you are close to the net in basketball and don’t need to run during a layup, you do not need to do a lot of work in a layup class.”

Collector’s Comments: I think that it is a good idea to take a layup if you are doing 2 other time demanding classes. Next term I am doing a difficult engineering class and a time consuming computer science class, so I chose to do an easy writing class so that I do not become overwhelmed and have time to enjoy myself.

Collector’s Name: Colin Kearns

Tags/ Keywords:

FA21

Dartmouth

Verbal Lore

Slang

Academic