Lexicon ·
sarging
verb, also noun (a sarge)
- Stated meaning
- Going out to meet women, as a skill to be practised.
- Operating meaning
- An evening out entered as practice, which makes everyone met during it part of the exercise.
- Origin
- Pickup vocabulary from the seminars of Ross Jeffries, said to be named for one of his cats. In use on alt.seduction.fast before its archive opens in 2003, and glossed in Neil Strauss's The Game in 2005.
The Game (opens in a new window) defined it in 2005: “Sarging is pickup artist jargon for going out to meet women; the term evidently has its origin in the name of one of Ross Jeffries’s cats, Sargy.” The word is older than the book. A 2003 post on alt.seduction.fast (opens in a new window) reproduced one from June 1999 that already had it in quotation marks: “So I guess it’s back to ‘sarging’ for me.” In 2007 another poster gave the cat’s name as Sarge. The archive holds more than 800 messages that use the word, and no agreement on the cat.
The verb made a night out countable. Once going out was sarging, each evening had a result, and the newsgroup was where results were reviewed. One poster in August 2003 described an encounter as a sarge that “could have been tight,” and asked for comments. Another, advising a newcomer on touch, closed with the board’s terms of service: “If you do experience a negative response you’re doing something wrong, which is why this board exists to help you out.”
Under load, the word changes who the evening is for. A night out is spent with the people in the room. A sarge is spent on them, and they are not told that the evening has a syllabus, or that what they say will be written up and marked. The only party to the original arrangement who was never assessed is the cat.