Etymology of Moded

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, aloha, Martha.

Aloha. Mahalo. Who’s this?

My name is Eric, and I’m calling from Bellingham, Washington.

Oh, I thought you were going to be from Hawaii.

Yeah, they don’t speak Hawaiian, do they?

I go there a lot.

Oh, okay.

My question’s regarding a little nugget of a slang word that had an accompanying gesture and kind of a little rhyme that went with it.

I grew up in the 80s, and the word is called moated.

And I believe the word was designed to be used like the slang word face.

Like if someone was like monkeying around and they got caught by the teacher, you would say, eww, you got moated.

And there was a gesture that was, you kind of scratched your chin or rubbed your chin with it.

And the rhyme, you want to hear the rhyme?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah, sure.

All right.

The rhyme was, moated, corroded, your booty exploded.

How old were you?

Nice.

I am turning 40 this year.

Well, how old were you when you said, moated, corroded, your booty exploded?

11 to 13.

11 to 13?

Yeah.

That’s about the right age for that.

And so your question is, what up with moated?

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I know what it means, why we used it, but how did the gesture and the word moded become that?

Where exactly were you?

I grew up in Southern California in South Bay, beach community.

Okay, okay.

And that’s consistent with this.

Moded is a distinctly Californian expression.

I don’t know if you Googled this, but if you did, you might have come across the entry I did on my Double Tongue Dictionary website.

And we should just spell this.

Most of the time it’s spelled M-O-D-E-D, although occasionally people will spell it as M-O-A-T-E-D.

One of the theories, and this is the most reliable one, is that it’s a form of the word demoted.

And by a process known as apharicis, the first syllable dropped off. And so it became moted, M-O-T-E-D.

And if you go to, and I’m not hyping my website just because I want people to go there, but I’ve got an entry for this and some citations that show it being used.

But even more interesting, some people have contributed their memories of this word as far back as the early 1970s, people who grew up in California.

And so there are a couple of people who say, I remember this from the mid 1970s or the early 1970s.

There’s at least one person who has almost exactly the same rhyme as you have. You’re moted, corroded, and your booty got exploded.

They talk about where they’re from, so Bay Area and San Francisco.

And then they also talk about the meaning of the word.

You talked about face, like you go, oh, faced.

And when I was growing up, we would say, burned, you got burned, and a lot of people still use that.

And that’s kind of in that same way, right, to show that somebody got beaten or that they got embarrassed or that things didn’t turn out like they planned, right?

Yeah.

And that’s pretty much, you know, I guess that’s the way we used it.

But why did we scratch our chin?

Really good question.

That kind of stuff, gestures are very difficult to track because they’re usually not put in print.

People usually don’t write about gestures in that way.

You know, for example, one of the problems we have with the history of the middle finger being used as something offensive is that people tended not to write about it.

We tend not to describe these gestures in print because they’re not transmitted with words.

They’re transmitted with the body.

And so there’s no written archive of this stuff.

I don’t know.

Yeah, that’s a weird one, isn’t it?

That’s a weird one. And frankly, I don’t think any of my contributors, any of the people who commented on the moded entry on my website, I don’t think any of them talked about it.

Really? Well, I mean, we even used the alternate, oh, scratch the chin, which is basically the same.

You would do the gesture without the expression?

Yeah, there’s many different variants for it. It depends on how moded the person was and how many people were watching you mode that person.

I see.

So this is interesting.

I love this expression because, for once, we can actually say a little bit about its history because it’s within living memory that this term has become popular.

And I’m always trying to find more information on this.

Eric, if you come across anything new, by all means, send it our way, and I’ll make sure that the world knows.

All right?

Well, awesome.

Thanks a lot.

I really enjoy your guys’ show.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Thanks, Colin.

Bye-bye, Eric.

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