Mopery

Mopery is a vague, informal, and usually humorous name for minor offenses. The word is based on the verb to mope, which originally meant “to wander aimlessly”; it only later acquired the overtones of “bored and depressed”. The word mope appears to have first been used in the 16th century, and appears in Shakespeare's works.

In 1970, in Columbus, Ohio, mopery was defined as “loitering while walking, or walking down the street with no clear destination or purpose”, and was used by police to stop and interview counterculture “hippies” who were regarded as unsavory. Some of those arrested were aggressively prosecuted by public prosecutor Karl T. Chrastan. In discussions of law, “mopery” is used as a placeholder name to mean some crime whose nature is not important to the problem at hand. This is sometimes expanded to “mopery with intent to creep” or "mopery with intent to gawk".

In fiction

The word mopery has been used by authors Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) and Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man), among others, for whom it is usually a comic accent. In Catch 22 (Joseph Heller, 1961), the mildly rebellious Cadet Clevinger is court-martialed by three angry officers, who accuse him of “breaking ranks while in formation, felonious assault, indiscriminate behavior, mopery, high treason, provoking, being a smart-guy, listening to classical music, and so on”.

Raymond Chandler in his 1949 novel "The Little Sister" uses the term, making Marlowe, whilst in police custody, say of a murder victim (Orrin Quest) "If he'd lived long enough you'd have had him up for mopery".

The 1944 comic novel Low Man on a Totem Pole by H. Allen Smith contains this line: “The girls stop at nothing short of mopery to get in the papers, mopery being the old English misdemeanor of exposing oneself in front of a blind man on a public highway”.

The 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds contains the following dialog: Sergeant: See that man over there, we arrested him for mopery. Booger: What's mopery? Sergeant: Mopery is exposing yourself to a blind person.

In episode 7 of Season 3 of Psych, "Talk Derby to Me", Shawn Spencer accuses Burton Guster of mopery when he attempts to hide in the car.

Sources

• The Word Detective

• William Safire, On Language, New York Times, June 5, 1988.