Signing Yearbooks
Photo credit: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The last week of school, when the yearbooks came out and everyone traded them around to scrawl in the margins and across each other's photos. 'HAGS,' 'stay sweet,' '2 good 2 be 4 gotten,' 'don't ever change, KIT!' — the same handful of phrases written over and over, sometimes next to a kid you'd barely spoken to all year.
Signing each other's yearbooks is a long-standing end-of-year ritual in American schools, but its particular slang reached full flower in the late 1980s and '90s. The shorthand was a language of its own: 'HAGS' for Have A Great Summer, 'KIT' for Keep In Touch, and the number-for-word wordplay of '2 good 2 be 4 gotten' — where 2 stood in for 'to' or 'too' and 4 for 'for.'
Alongside the acronyms came a small canon of well-worn well-wishes: 'stay sweet,' 'don't ever change,' and the deadpan comedy of writing any of them beside the photo of someone you hardly knew. The messages were formulaic on purpose — the point wasn't originality, it was that everyone signed everyone's, filling the blank endpapers and photo pages with a wall of near-identical goodbyes.
The signing itself never stopped; kids still pass yearbooks around on the last days of school. What dates the ritual so precisely is the slang — 'HAGS' and '2 good 2 be 4 gotten' now read as pure period detail, an instant time-stamp for anyone who filled a page with them.
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