By Roger Bill.
If you log into the website www.pof.com, or Plenty of Fish, you will find yourself at a dating service where you will encounter lots of people hoping to meet people. If you log into the website www.plentyofskeets.com you will find yourself at the official dockets for the courts in Newfoundland and Labrador where you will encounter lots of people who are scheduled to appear before a judge.
Plentyofskeets.com is a joke created in 2016 by someone in St. John’s who describes himself as an “amateur comedian.” The joke, if your sense of humour skews in that direction, is a play on the notion that one of the characteristics of skeets in Newfoundland is that they are criminals. Not just low-income layabouts who never finished school. Not just a subculture with their own manner of speech, dress, and behavior, but criminals.
This notion of the Newfoundland skeet is similar to the Chav stereotype in the UK, a lower class petty criminal with limited education or according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, “a thieving, pot smoking, gaudy-jewelry-wearing, white kid with no ambition.” In Ireland they are called Skangers. In Australia they are called Eshays. In the USA the closest derogatory term would be white trash or trailer trash, lower-class and poorly educated whites with not much of a future except in the methamphetamine industry. I don’t know what sociolinguists or other academics attribute the staying-power of the word skeet in Newfoundland to, but there is no disputing it endures.
The term skeet is specific to Newfoundland and pejorative. Yes, but if you’ve ever encountered the skeets in Bannerman Park then you know the criminal stereotype is not a universally applicable label. The Bannerman Park skeets are reminiscent of the clever rascal Jack in Newfoundland folktales, people who may be a little bit on the other side of the line of the law, but not likely to steal your phone. Maybe they would buy it from the person who stole it from you and sell it back to you, but the Bannerman Park skeet doesn’t make the park less safe.
Several variations of skeets can be observed in Bannerman Park. Some have neck tattoos, but rarely does a Bannerman Park skeet have a facial tattoo. As well, while you will often see a skeet in his 20’s showing a jailhouse stride it seems more imitative than acquired.
The Bannerman Park skeet also surprises in ways that a Water Street skeet with baggy pants hanging halfway off his ass doesn’t. The Water Street skeet jailhouse strides down the sidewalk and doesn’t give a shit and he wants you to know he doesn’t give a shit and not far below the surface is anger so stay out of his way. The Bannerman Park skeet has a softer edge.
For example,
The Frisbee Catching Skateboard Skeet
In Bannerman Park skeets gather on the grass next to Rennie’s Mill Road and smoke cigarettes and drink beer and sometimes throw around a frisbee. There is one lean skeet who wears baggy basketball pants, no shirt, and a yellow bandana on his head who sprints across the field and leaps and catches a frisbee that looks impossible to catch. Then he picks up his skateboard and strides over to the Loop, a meandering ice-skating surface in the Winter and a smooth concrete skateboard venue in Summer
Skeets and skateboarders both favour baggy hip-hop attire and they can easily be confused. Sort of like guys carrying gear on film shoots look like skeets, too. But, there is something in the attitude that hints whether someone knows what the word “lock up” means or not.
The chest of the guy wearing the yellow bandana is tattooed. His shoulders are tattooed. He has a spider web tattoo on one of his elbows. He throws down his skateboard and jumps on and accelerates. Faster than anybody else, he goes around and around and when he tries a jump and miss’s he says to nobody in particular, “You can’t land them all. You can’t land them all.” Skeets probably learn that at a young age.
One day the lean skeet with the yellow bandana was racing around the Loop and he was wearing a headset. He was shouting, “I see you. Can you see me? Can you see me?” There was an old guy sitting on the bench by the clock beside the Loop and the only other people around were a woman with two small children and a slow skateboarding young woman dressed in black. She had a tattoo that looked like a narrow string around her thigh. The skeet with the yellow bandana never seemed to get tired. He just kept racing around and around.
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