Why didn't the slang "emo" float around when I was in high school? When did "emo" enter popular parlance?

first time i heard the term emo was at a gig, around Lancaster in 1990 to describe the type of music a band called Admiral was playing. Short for "Emotional Hardcore" as it was. Admiral broke up shortly there after and members started up the bands Hoover and Navio Forge I believe as well as many other bands through the years.

Jimmy Eat World has very loosly considered emo back in the day. We called them and bands like them, the Get Up Kids, the Promise Ring, even Texas is the Reason "pop emo" as their music had less to do with hardcore compared to many of the screamier bands. In my opinion what these bands were doing was going after or dumbing down/making what Cap N' Jazz started more accessible. Maybe not consciously but that's how it came off (though Promise Ring initially carried the CNJ banner well for obvious reasons).

What's considered emo today would not have been considered emo back in the early 90's. It'd be considered mainstream pop music. Which basically now it is.

"Emo" appeared as a name for a music genre in the eighties, and, as it became more popular, was applied as the name of it's associated fashion trend in the nineties.

Read this definition:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=emo

Genre of softcore punk music that integrates unenthusiastic melodramatic 17 year olds who dont smile, high pitched overwrought lyrics and inaudible guitar rifts with tight wool sweaters, tighter jeans, itchy scarfs (even in the summer), ripped chucks with favorite bands signature, black square rimmed glasses, and ebony greasy unwashed hair that is required to cover at least 3/5 ths of the face at an angle.


I think that terms and languages change throughout time and history. For example, the 1920's " bee's knees" would mean someone or something extraordinary. Now the term is nonexistent and the language changed. Different culture also shaped the way Americans speak right now. "Emo" wasn't a popular term back then, but now it has incorporated itself as a popular term, like so many others. The American dictionary updates its words every year, putting more new words in, and rejecting the old ones.

In your day, an emo person would be a punk or a prankster.

Etymology - Abbreviation of emotional.
Plural countable and uncountable - emos

(Verification for this usage is being sought)+: (uncountable, music, early 1990s) A particular style of hardcore punk rock

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Emo

emo (EE-moh) n. A music genre that features a heavy, guitar-based sound and melodic, emotional tunes. —emo adj.

Example Citation:
Jimmy Eat World makes "emo" rock, one of those know-it-when-you-hear-it genres that seems as much an attitude as a type of music. "Emo" bands, which have done plenty of late to push amplified guitars back up the charts, tend to keep it simple instrument-wise, and they produce a grunge-inspired racket with a careful sense of verse-chorus songcraft. . . . Along with the geek-rockers of Weezer, Jimmy Eat World is probably the most popular emo band out there, with a couple of bona fide radio hits and a few critically acclaimed albums to its nonsensical name.
—David Segal. "Jimmy Eat World: Love And Angst Over Easy," The Washington Post, June 7, 2002

Earliest Citation:
The opening Samiam semi-scored with a mostly grinding, intermittently soaring set, with singer Jason Beckout mixing rage and introspection and the band straddling the punk/metal line. "You can't exactly call it punk rock," said drummer Victor Indirizzo, after the set. "But it's in that vein. Some people call it 'melody-core' or 'emo-core,' for emotion."
—Jim Sullivan, "Bad Religion stays too faithful to itself," The Boston Globe, November 17, 1994

This three piece does the loud, melodic emo (short for "emotional") punk thing kids seem to dig so much these days, accented by sudden speed shifts.
—"1997 New Times Music Awards Showcase," Phoenix New Times, April 17, 1997

http://www.wordspy.com/words/emo.asp

Musical genres come and go, often too quickly to tie them down, but this one has been gestating out of mainstream sight for many years. It is short for emotional, and it turns up in terms like emo-rock, emo-punk and emocore (in which the second element is from hardcore, as in hardcore punk, out of which the form first grew around 1984). Long lurking in the musical underground, an expansion in popularity means it has become one of the more popular American underground rock modes in the late 1990s and is now edging tentatively towards the mainstream, with bands like Jimmy Eat World and Weezer. This shift is something that many enthusiasts feel is against its strong anti-commercial spirit. It has now crossed the Atlantic as well. In style, it’s variable, but it’s less macho than hardcore, often full of complicated and layered guitar passages, with passionate and confessional lyrics. The emphasis is certainly on emotion, so the name is appropriate. Despite a report that the term had been invented in the late 1980s in Washington, DC, the first definite sighting of emo I’ve come across in print is from 1999.

While emo may be a controversial term that gets thrown around all too often, Victory at Sea should be proud of the label. It plays in the tradition of some of the best emo bands, such as Sunny Day Real Estate and Modest Mouse, by combining complex guitar work with deeply wrought lyrics.

[Washington Times, Oct. 2001]

In their mid 20s, Jimmy Eat World are hardly newcomers, and carry with them an “emo” following — the subculture that’s sprung up around emotional U.S. indie-punk bands — and sizable street-cred.

[Calgary Sun, Dec. 2001]

http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-emo1.htm

Emo (pronounced /ˈiːmoʊ/) is a style of rock music which describes several independent variations of music with common stylistic roots. As such, use of the term has been the subject of much debate. In the mid-1980s, the term emo described a subgenre of hardcore punk which originated in the Washington, D.C. music scene. In later years, the term emocore, short for "emotional hardcore", was also used to describe the emotional performances of bands in the Washington, D.C. scene and some of the offshoot regional scenes such as Rites of Spring, Embrace, One Last Wish, Beefeater, Gray Matter, Fire Party, and later, Moss Icon. (In more recent years, the term "emotive hardcore" entered the lexicon to describe the period.)

Starting in the mid-1990s, the term emo began to refer to the indie scene that followed the influences of Fugazi, which itself was an offshoot of the first wave of emo. Bands including Sunny Day Real Estate and Texas Is the Reason had a more indie rock style of emo, more melodic and less chaotic. The so-called "indie emo" scene survived until the late 1990s, as many of the bands either disbanded or shifted to mainstream styles. As the remaining indie emo bands entered the mainstream, newer bands began to emulate the mainstream style. As a result, the term "emo" became a vaguely defined identifier rather than a specific genre of music.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emo_%28slang%29