EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: She got that drip

They say she got that drip, and I’m like: Hey man, don’t talk about my daughter that way. She’s only 17.

But it turns out she just might have that drip. Which is a good thing. Now, anyway.

To have that drip, in modern parlance, is to have oneself together in a sartorial sense, to present a spectacular pastiche of clothing, make-up, hairstyle, accessories. Accessories, yes! That’s the drip! To have that drip is to be fresh, to be fly, to be on fleek. But nobody says those things anymore. Because now we’ve got that drip.

Cam Newton got that drip. Miley Cyrus got that drip. And I suppose my daughter — a promising young goth who’s festooned herself with chains, piercings, homemade patches, gloomy eye makeup and peculiar jewelry — has got that drip as well.

In a good way, you understand.

Back in the last century, drip was used to describe a phenomenon experienced by aficionados of cocaine and other snortable drugs. After ingestion, the goods would mingle with sinusoidal juices to slide down the back of the throat. It could sometimes trigger a gag reflex, but also it signified that the process was working, a net neutral.

But to Oscar, a bar customer of mine back in 1993, the drip was a very bad thing indeed. He told me he got it in France during WWII, and required several rounds of antibiotics to rid himself of it.

Come to think of it, Oscar had a bit of that drip to him as well: He always wore his antiqued leather fighter jacket, took a fresh shave every day, smoothed pomade through his hair before coming in for an afternoon of Dewars.

But Oscar was not a drip, in which the word becomes something else entirely as its placed with an indefinite article. A drip is someone eminently forgettable — the person whose name always slips your mind, who blends into the walls, with a presence like water at room temperature. A drip could never have the drip, not the good kind and probably not the bad kind either. Because even catching a venereal disease requires a little derring-do.