SWILlie

From SWILwiki

The term SWILlie is the most commonly used and unambigious term for a SWIL non-member, all other terms -- including "non-member" itself -- being more or less restricted to SWIL. This is the term used to refer to SWIL non-members by SWIL members, who usually capitalize it as "Swillie" or, in one instance of embarrassing misuse by an uninformed outsider at the Philadelphia Inquirer, "Swellie".

Opinion on the use of the term is divided among SWILlies themselves, since the fact that it is a commonly used Campus term means that it bears somewhat of a negative stigma, similar to the term "Trekkie" for Star Trek fans, but most current-student SWILlies have more or less embraced it. It serves, for instance, the useful function of identifying para-SWIL members and officially proven-sentient non-members with the same term, as well as being a useful adjective for identifying things that are associated with SWIL, or even things that aren't but are the sort of thing that might be.

The actual origin of "SWILlies" was contested on the chat list, since the term (like "Parrish Beach", "spec", and "Swattie") is one of the ones widely considered to be timeless but actually emerged at quite a specific point in recent Swarthmore history. While it's the primary term currently in use, many alumni didn't even know it had ever come into common usage, preferring to call themselves "SWILniks" or "SWILfolk". It is now believed to have been first coined in Aaron Hertzmann's SWILshirt that portrayed a box of SWIL breakfast cereal: "Crunchy SWILLIES!" by analogy to, for instance, "Wheaties". The term came into common usage sometime after Aaron had returned to Rice University.

At various times in the past controversy has arisen over the proper way to write "SWILlie" -- a term that, like many terms derived from an acronym that fail to respect the original semantic meaning of the acronym's components, cannot help but have an awkward orthography. In response, some SWILlies have begun to use a term used by a minority of Campus, including the rugby team, "SWILs", as this remains faithful to the original meaning of the acronym (which can apply to an individual "Warder of Imaginative Literature" as easily as it can the organization collectively) and has no such orthographic ambiguity. However, this usage has thus far failed to gain more than a minor following.