In And Around Language: "Twerking"

Many millenials have had the inauspicious pleasure of watching Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance. Well, performance is a strong word. For six minutes, hell was recreated on stage with all the attendant teddy bears and rasping attempts at singing. But the piece of the Miley experience that had people up in arms screaming over social media was her twerking, a word which largely hadn’t entered our vocabulary until the ex-Disney starlet graphically displayed its meaning on national television.

The Oxford Dictionaries Online officially added twerk to its lexicon this August, citing Miley’s press-mongering performance at the VMAs as sufficient cultural capital to the word’s credit. The definition, as read by Morgan Freeman, is “to dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance.” While technically accurate, this definition does little to capture the blatant sexuality of the motion. Because twerking’s popular streak has been largely propagated by internet and youth culture, it seems appropriate that a more colorful definition was listed almost a year earlier on Urban Dictionary: “The rhythmic gyrating of the lower fleshy extremeties [sic] in a lascivious manner with the intent to elicit sexual arousal or laughter in ones [sic] intended audience.” Twerking even had the honor of being declared the May 3, 2013 Urban Word of the Day. However, the sudden surge in it’s popularity does not do the move credit.

Twerking has been sitting on the backburner of American culture for 20 years. The first documented use of the word was in the 1993 song “Jubilee” by D.J. Jubilee. D.J. Jubilee could not be reached for comment, but popular etymological theory holds two possible origins for the word. The first is that it is a variation of the word “work.” Under this model, it’s assumed that club managers and D.J. Jubilee found the phrase “work it” insufficient for motivating dancers and thus invented the novel phrase “twerk it” to convey the added passion and undulations of their desires. The other theory is that twerk is a portmanteau of “twist” and “jerk.” Upon physical analysis of the twerk motion, it is difficult to find a twisting dimension to the conventional move (variations aside), and so the former origin story seems more likely.

It’s possible that the twerk was not invented in America, and instead was imported from Africa. The mapouka, a traditional dance in southeast Côte d’Ivoire, has been compared to the twerk. The government of Côte d’Ivoire took extreme measures against what it viewed as uncontrolled depravity, banning the mapouka in public in 1998. This has only served to increase its popularity in the region, a lesson that the U.S. learned during the Prohibition. It is unclear whether the similarity in movement is due to the influence of mapouka on bounce culture in New Orleans or whether both regions independently discovered the limitations on how much booty one can work.

While Miley has certainly expired her renewed lease on fame, it is unclear whether or not the twerk is here to stay. Perhaps new frontiers of provocative dance will be penetrated. Perhaps a government crackdown will drive the twerk underground, slowly burning as a symbol of American counterculture. Rather like watching twerking itself, all we can do is observe the phenomenon with some mixture of horror, arousal, and incredulity.