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Let’s go owling!

The Word

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

October 30, 2011|By Erin McKean

(iStockPhoto; Globe Staff…)

If you’ve been within shouting distance of the Internet over the last six months, you’ve probably heard of planking, a social-media-driven pastime involving lying facedown on some unlikely surface, arms against your sides, very still, while someone takes your picture. As adolescent pranks go, planking is fairly innocuous, although one young Australian man did fall to his death while trying to plank on a balcony railing last May.

Both the gerund form of planking (though it’s also known as “the lying-down game” and “extreme lying down”) and the idea of taking ridiculous photos in uncomfortable positions have become extremely productive--at least linguistically. Apparently, ubiquitous cellphone cameras (both still and video), high spirits, and the Internet add up to limitless photo-fad variations. If you can think of a noun and add –ing, it seems, you can find a picture or video of some absurdist interaction with that noun online.

Planking begat pillaring, in which the photographee stands very still, upright, a planker turned 90 degrees. Toothpicking is pillaring turned on its head, literally: The prankster is photographed doing a rigid headstand. In peeping or peeking, you have a photo taken that shows you looking into or out from behind some structure: from around a post, from inside a Dumpster, and so on. Escalating is planking (or leaning) on the handrails of a moving escalator; balling involves being photographed on top of something while curled, arms around legs, into a ball. There’s also owling, which involves perching on something like an owl.

Not all these photo pranks are as simple as planking: In stocking, memesters choose a banal stock photo and try to re-create it as faithfully as possible. The singer Nicki Minaj claims to have started fridging, taking a photo of yourself posing in a refrigerator (a photo in front of a dorm-sized fridge is, of course, mini-fridging). Certainly the weirdest photomeme is catbearding, which requires positioning a cat so that it looks like facial hair.

A subset of planking-inspired pranks targets the long-suffering people who work in fast-food drive-throughs. Cone-ing involves ordering a soft-serve ice cream cone, and then, when handed it by the drive-through worker, grabbing it by the ice cream. A UK variant is flake-ing, where the customer takes only the Cadbury Flake chocolate bar (a standard garnish for soft-serve in the United Kingdom), leaving the rest of the cone behind. In ignore-ing, food is ordered and paid for, but the prankster ignores the proffered bag and drives away without a word. Trophying and gnoming involve handing the drive-through attendant a trophy or a miniature garden gnome, respectively.