How It's Used

“And then hey goombah!
I love how you dance the rumba.
But take some advice paisano,
learn-a how to mambo
If you gonna be a square
you ain't-a gonna go nowhere
The Hey Mambo! Mambo Italiano!
Hey Mambo! Mambo Italiano!”

“In the late 1930's and early 40's a group of young Negro jazzmen—notably Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach—created a strikingly new kind of music. Later called bop, it first sounded dissonant and meaningless to all but a handful of listeners. The rest scorned or ignored it. Bop musicians and their few fellow travelers reacted to their rejection by disdaining nonsympathizers as 'squares' and closing ranks in an unofficial brotherhood. For its most avid supporters, the new music became virtually a religion, revealed and upheld with evangelical zeal.”

“But one suspects that [the University of] Maryland’s soft approach [toward its students’ transgressions] isn’t just the petty calculation of bean-counters.  Administrators, no less than faculty, have a horror of coming off as squares.”

“Throughout 'In My Life,' the characters keep insisting, in song and speech, on how strange life is and how crazy they all are. They protest too much. 'In My Life' brings to mind that annoying breed of people who never stop talking about their quirks ('Yep, I collect dolls made out of seashells and eat gummi bears for breakfast—that's how wacky I am') because they are so afraid of being found out as the squares they truly are.”

"A mop-haired Midwesterner who looks far younger than 51, Mr [Jonathan] Franzen rose to fame a decade ago. This was when his third novel, The Corrections, a multigenerational family saga about American yuppies and their square parents, was first selected as a candidate for Oprah Winfrey’s book club and then very publicly dismissed by the television star. (Ms Winfrey did not care for Mr Franzen’s complaint that her book club appealed only to women readers.) The brouhaha did his book no harm."

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