I assumed it was (again) American, as it was through American media i heard it first... I don't know why we use it in all honesty, as most other schools use the word Term, as you've said.
I think it's from 'High School Musical.' ...tho I was raised on girl film 'Breakfast Gang' - about detentions. Girls forced us to watch it, over and over, a really terrible adolescence.
...but there was that cool guy who made it all right, wore a long coat many years before Neo. ETA: term = trimester where everyone's a flunker
Couldnt tell you much about girlie films, spent a lot of my childhood enjoying Harry Potter, in my teen years, listening to heavy metal, and being the psychopath i am and laughing at horror films...
far from it... laughing at horror is a strong indicator of a well-balanced person... along with doing at least 40% of the housework. Random fact. v.off topic. Sorry. [not a serious post] [true though]
Remember every post must contain some reference to flunky. I don't like any films. I wanted to be the sort of person who likes foreign films, but can't find a machine to show them, or find them even, anywhere to put them in front of my eyes. I wanted to like 'Tarzan' but then the film guys said it was rotten. I am reduced to watching prank clips on youtube, frankly that's good enough. Most of my jobs have been fairly flunky. When I was fifteen we had to line the headmaster's garden and wave flags for the mayor. I nearly committed suicide that day, nearly swallowed my badges hidden behind the lapels in protest at capitalism..kind of thing. [a bit dis-jointed]
When the battle was over the dead lay dead upon the dead ground. They lay that way for a long time. The first thing to grow there were flunkies. The dawn of a new world.
In Canada it was used to define anyone who flunked a grade. As in - who's the flunky? But that goes back a few years - the 80s. You could really pile up the names back then - Hey metalmouth, geek, flunky - yeah, I'm talking to you.
...that's beautiful too @ Peachalulu ... That's so beautiful, I wrote a beautiful poem like that, I'll go find it. Y'know, aside from the Bonobo, [sp?] I always admired the Flunkies of Finland, how they endure in wasteland, their almost man-like qualities and suffering with the lack of canopy to swing between [or among]. Instead they must swim. Only lakes in Finland, y'know. [total shit]
And that must have been only a part of Canada, because I'm Canadian and couldn't imagine the word being used this way. Ah, regionalisms.
American students often skip school (play truant) but don't necessarily flunk. Skip simply means you don't go to class. Flunk means you fail the class. Somebody who flunks out of school (usually high school) is somebody whose overall grades are so bad that they don't accumulate the points they need to graduate and get a diploma. Americans, at least when I lived there, don't have what you guys have in the way of exams. We do have exams, but they are counted as part of the overall grade for a class, not the entirety of it. And it's done on a class by class system. You pass classes, which may or may not include 'final exams.' If you pass enough classes, you can get a diploma and graduate. If you 'flunk' all or most of your classes, you don't graduate. Americans usually refer to their 'grade point average,' meaning how successful they were, overall, during their four years of high school, grades 9-12. (Nowadays I believe it's three years, because there is now a middle school, which didn't really exist when I was in school. Grades 7-9 are now held in a separate school in a separate building these days. This is called Junior High. When I was young, grades 7 and 8 were tacked on to the end of primary, or 'grade school' while grade 9 was considered the freshman year of high school.) If your grade-point average at the end of your high school years was 95 or higher (up to 100) that meant you were an 'A' student, and in the upper part of your graduating class. A 'B' student was in the 90-94 point range. A 'C' student would graduate with an average of 85 to 89. A 'D' student (80-84) would scrape together enough points to graduate, but would be on the lowest end of the scale. Anybody with an average grade point score of 79 or less had failed or flunked out of school. I actually prefer the American system of schooling (when it's done well) because it doesn't make the kid's whole future ride on the outcome of one exam or series of exams. I don't like seeing the stress that British kids undergo at this time of their lives. I'd much rather the system allowed for mistakes, and used an accumulated series of points gathered over the years rather than one big whammy. I also don't like the idea that kids have to more or less decide what they plan to do with their lives long before most of them are ready to. I think schooling should be a time for exploration, for discovering what you're good at, for taking risks at things you may not be good at, etc, without the risk of 'failure' hanging so heavily over it all. I know so many people who didn't do well at school, because they were emotionally immature, who later went back, went to college and did extremely well at it. My nephew is one of them. He nearly failed (flunked out of) high school because he just wasn't interested (and struggled with his classes because he had sight problems.) At the age of 31, he has just graduated with a Cum Laude Masters in Clinical Psychology, and is about to start a very good job. Yet he barely squeaked through high school with a D average. I don't think a British kid would get the opportunity to do that sort of thing, would they?
Great post @jannert This should hold true for later in life too. Here in the UK if you fail in entrepreneurism and go bankrupt it's quite a stain on your character. In the US, it's 'more tough luck fella, no shame—give it another go'.
I'm finding this thread very fascinating. I've only heard "flunkee" to mean someone on the lower rung of society. They didn't necessarily have to flunk out of school, but they're the type of people that just barely made it through and now work at McDonalds or as garbagemen. To me it means anyone who lacks intellectual, academic, or professional success and is meant to be derogatory.
