What’s in a Squee? (And what the HECK is it, anyway?)

Unlike the days of long ago, you don’t simply pull out your dog-eared copy of the EOD (English Oxford Dictionary, for those of you who aren’t old enough to recall the days before Google, Ask Jeeves or Dictionary.com) when you run across a word you don’t know. American society now finds its words in some of the most unlikely places. For today, I’m looking to the worlds of fandom for one of the apparently most confounding words of recent memory. This does not mean we can’t look to the resources around us for a definition; but we also need to look to the context; the user and the geeky world that inspired the exclamation, “Squee!” If we go to Google, and search on “squee”, we’ll find many offerings akin to this one, with people offering their own interpretations of the word. Squee rates its own Wikipedia entry, and several  urban dictionaries add their offerings, too. Wikipedia tells us that Jhonen Vasquez’s comic book Johnny the Homicidal Maniac features a character by the name of Squee. The odd little guy even rated his own four-issue mini series that was later collected into a trade paperback called Squee’s Wonderful Big Giant Book of Unspeakable Horrors. As an amusing aside, Squee’s best friend is a dilapidated teddy bear, named Shmee; who should not be confused with Shmoo, and Mr. Smee is right out. The Urban Dictionary has quite a bit to say about our word of the day. The gist of it is, though, that it is a sound emitted by fan girls who are experiencing extreme excitement, presumably due to something fairly geektastic in nature. (I would offer, however, that the squees heard at DragonCon, Comic-Con, BlizzCon and the like might not ALL have to do with visual stimulus, at least not during the after hours suite parties, but I digress…)

If I were going to formulate an official-ish dictionary entry for squee, I think it would something like this:

Squee:

• noun – the joy filling a geek’s heart to overflowing; the conceptual essence of geek joy – “She was filled with squee, when she earned her violet protodrake mount.” The sound one makes when confronted with or presented with something worthy, exciting, startling or amazing, usually in an area of media geekdom, such as comics, books or movies; “He sounded his Conan the Barbarian Squee over the table tops of the gaming room, when he rolled the crit hit on the dragon.”
• verb – the act of emitting a loud, excited sound, often in a girlish manner, but not limited to females; “She’ll squee long and loud when David Tennant makes his appearance at the Doctor Who convention.” The internalization of sheer geeky joy; “She squeed herself.”
• interjection – used as an explosive exclamation; “SQUEE!!!”

Obviously, when you’re dealing with a “made up” word, it can be tricky business, determining the origin of the word. However, I would put my money on a derivation of the word “squeal”, if shoved to push through to a deduction. This is open to debate, but the similarities in definition and usage of the word as a verb lends itself to a convincing argument in favor of the antiquated “squeal.”

Creativity abounds when you take the contemplation and evaluation of “squee” to the next level. The word lends itself to linguistic morphing and word play quite nicely. I suppose when you’re working with slang, the rules are indeed different, if they exist, at all. Some common – or not so common except by me – examples include:

• Squeegasm – when you find the Squee Spot
• Squeetastic – almost too much squee for one fan
• Squeemish – the feeling that overcomes you, sometimes, when overcome by a squee inducing moment
• Squee-worthy – worthy of a squee (some things really are exactly what they seem – sometimes a squee is just a squee.)
• SqueeGee – to be awash in squeegasms (see Squee Spot – luckily, geek gyrls AND boys can have multiple squeegasms)

So this brings me to the $64,000 query that we’ll examine and try to answer over and over (see multiples) here at the Squee Spot:

What makes you squee?