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post-punk and the clothes were simply . . . black. Mystery lingers over who first appropriated the word “Goth” to describe this new kind of young freak; my beloved Ian Astbury (one of those Goth icons who insists he’s not Goth at all) is just one who has staked his claim to it.
    By the mid-1980s, the G-word was well established, and a collective consciousness evolved around the term. Gothic rock was a legit musical genre. There were Goth-specific shops, Goth magazines and Goth festivals. Goth was now a somewhat recognizable thing, a world of Victorian- or Medieval-inspired sense and sensibilities co-mingling with punk rock and S&M attitude and fashion. And the diverse crew of anarchists, art school brats and horror movie fans who had started it seemed to have been distilled into a fairly homogenous bunch — one quite easy to identify. Or so we thought. Thanks to explosion of the internet in the mid-1990s these people — many of them misfits in small towns around the globe — started to find each other in great numbers. And as they chatted amongst themselves, they discovered that as much as they were all drawn to what had come to be known as Goth, they weren’t necessarily alike. A popular question became, “Is [this thing I like/hate] Goth?” Because, like any good species seeking immortality, the subculture was mutating, drawing upon new influences such as cyberpunk, rave culture and anime and finding new ways of expressing a devotion to the dark side beyond black eyeliner and backcombed hair. The different factions named themselves: rivetheads, Cybergoths, Romantigoths, etc. Each new wave brought their own codes of conduct and methods of communication. For the one thing these sub-groups had in common was that each sought to distinguish itself from the others, and from youth culture trends at large. And so, Goths reevaluated what the G-word meant, twisting it into new variations to suit the bewildering number of subgenres and sub-subgenres, so much so that terms such as Trad Goth emerged to distinguish the old-school original folk from the new.
    The net.goths also developed their own particular parlance, a mash-up of in-jokes and slang designed mostly for self-amusement but also serving to keep outsiders out, or at least make fun of them when they crept ’round. (“Them” meaning mostly the legions of spooky kids adopting Goth in the late 1990s in wake of the mainstream popularity of Hot Topic and Marilyn Manson.) If you’ve ever thought Goths take themselves too seriously, you’ve never watched them make up names for their silly dance moves or craft Goth specific pick-up lines. (You can look up Pulling the Taffy and Nice Boots in the pages that follow.) Valiant attempts to catalogue this Goth talk were made, with FAQs helping Babybats and Elder Goths alike decipher an ever-evolving lexicon of musical genres, clothing styles, communities, and so on. But as the web grew, these resources fell fallow. Now, as a second and third generation of children of the night have come into their own, with their own bands, fashion and texting or IM shorthands, it seems we’re barely speaking the same language anymore.
    So it’s no real surprise that it’s more difficult than ever to actually explain What Is Goth. You could turn to the Oxford English Dictionary , but even it has trouble:
    Goth: 1. a member of a Germanic people that invaded the Roman Empire in the third and fifth centuries. 2. an uncivilized or ignorant person. 3. (goth) a) a style of rock music derived from punk, often with apocalyptic or mystical lyrics. b) member of a subculture favouring black clothing, black and white make-up, metal jewelry and goth music.
    As a self-professed word geek I am loath to pick a fight with the mighty OED. Yet as a Goth Girl, I must. For while I am certain that those who laboured over this particular entry were as scrupulous as can be, in their brevity they have failed to suitably put to rest the question of What Is Goth?