RHTS

The internet didn’t invent abbreviations, although IMO it can look like it sometimes.

Back in middle school, I got to learn some of these for the first time. Why middle school? Probably because that’s when kids really start feeling social pressure for the first time. Middle school always felt about one step shy of becoming Lord of the Flies to me, and kids were always looking for a way to push boundaries.

That social pressure led to some abbreviations (nope, not acronyms!) that encoded a secret message that presumably only middle school kids could understand. Among the signatures from my yearbooks from back then were more mundane slogans like TTYL, which is pretty common on the internet today, LYLAB or LYLAS (Love You Like A Brother/Sister), and KIT (Keep In Touch).

None of those had anything on RHTS.

RHTS stood for Raise Hell This Summer. This was the middle school mantra, and nothing else even came close.

Why? Presumably because you couldn’t raise proverbial hell during the school year. In fact, the school year was kind of already hell for me, at least for about half of the time. The other half was planning and executing extracurricular adventures with my friends.

These were the times when we would get together in the library, before school started, so we could play a custom role-playing game I had made up based on the TV show Werewolf. Or, we would play tetherball or four-square during recess, or it might even be as simple as eating lunch with a small group of friends (although lunch in the cafeteria was far from comfortable most of the time).

Summer represented the ultimate freedom for an eleven- or twelve-year-old kid. Then, we got to set our own schedule for the day. That schedule gradually became a template for entrepreneurship for me. I quickly recognized that I would need to generate some income if I wanted to participate in… well, most activities.

I hustled by delivering newspapers and mowing lawns and all that usual kid stuff, but embedded in those tasks was the need to consider work-life balance for the first time. A bit of time-budgeting let me do the chores so I could buy the D&D books, so we could play D&D. Or, it enabled me to go with my friends to the movies or to the arcade, or to buy a video game.

Whenever I saw RHTS, I was probably supposed to think of raging keggers and partying all night. Maybe I really did think that—I’m sure I bought into the mystique about what kids were supposed to be doing all summer long (GFTS was another one; I’ll let you figure that one out).

In reality, though, summers were simply about freedom for me and my friends. The things we did with that freedom ranged from silly to genius, but all summer long, we were learning how to live a life that didn’t involve deep institutional constraints. Summers were certainly a breath of fresh air every year.

Do you remember seeing RHTS or any of these other abbreviations in your yearbooks? Did the kids use any other method of coded language you find noteworthy today? Did you raise any actual hell over the summers?