Gretchen
(played by Lacey Chabert): “That is
so fetch!”
Regina
(played by Rachel McAdams): “Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen!
It's not going to happen!”—Mean Girls (2004), screenplay by Tina Fey, based on the nonfiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your
Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of
Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman, directed by Mark Waters
Ten years ago this past week, Mean Girls premiered. While some of the movie’s gains were
ephemeral (notably, Lindsay Lohan’s status as an “It Girl”), it did confirm
that Tina Fey’s writing talents
extended further than Saturday Night Live
skits. (Indeed, I have a hard time thinking of this as a “Mark Waters Film,”
though proponents of the auteur theory of the director’s primacy would
assuredly think of the movie in this way.)
Lindsay Lohan’s Cady comes from Africa, but that
background prepares her in no way for the tribal customs of American teenagers.
One of these mores depicted in this scene is the teen propensity to
create slang. In this group, slang terms arise spontaneously, and in such
plentitude as to make one wonder if each teen tries to create his or her own.
That was certainly the case for the not-so-mean guys I hung around with nearly
40 years ago. Words like “run” and “chooch” became our own private
language—fiercely used for a while, and now, I suspect, last employed so long
ago by any of us that the usage might as well have been in another lifetime.
“Fetch” is Gretchen’s ill-starred attempt to replace
“Cool.” My friends and our older siblings used an offshoot of this, “Cool it,”
in urging someone to calm down. That phrase, such an example of hip slang in Plaza Suite, sounded utterly dated by
2000, when playwright Neil Simon wanted to fuse his 1968 comedy with successors
California Suite and London Suite. By the millennium, he
realized not only that the plays’ architecture needed to be reconfigured, but
also their interior decoration—the one-liners that had set audiences roaring
with laughter in the Sixties and early Seventies. And so, for his 2000 play Hotel Suite, “cool it” was dropped in
favor of another term more contemporary, but, in tone, not unrelated: “Chill
out.”
"I don't know why I'm alive and Jimi [Hendrix] isn't and Janis
[Joplin] isn't and Mama Cass isn't and all my other friends. I have no idea why
me, but I got lucky."—Rock ‘n’ roll ex-party animal David Crosby,
quoted in Stephen Rodrick, “David Crosby: The Golden Years of Rock's Unlikeliest Survivor,” Rolling Stone, February 19, 2014 
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