County Council Chairwoman Alice Cycler handed me a copy of an editorial from a North Florida newspaper last week. It talked about CAVE dwellers, CAVE meaning Citizens Against Virtually Everything.
—Bo Poertner, "Is latest criticism worthwhile talk or just worthless?," Orlando Sentinel Tribune, September 30, 1990
Today's word is mostly used in a pejorative sense, as the phrases
CAVE people and
CAVE dweller suggest. However, as is often the case with offensive terms, the offendees have reappropriated the word and now often speak with pride about being part of a
CAVE Society or being a
CAVEr.
Tracking down the earliest use for this term proved to be more frustrating than usual. Maddeningly, the closest I could get was citation below, which references an earlier editorial from some nameless "North Florida newspaper."
I asked the author of this article about the name of the mystery paper, but he couldn't remember it, so the search remains open.
Subscriber John Lehner suggests that this term may have been inspired by the Vietnam-era acronym SWINE — Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything. This was coined by Al Capp of L'il Abner comic strip fame, and it still makes the occasional public appearance in print:
The Stewarts' letter reminds me of members of an organization the great cartoonist Al Capp called SWINE: Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything!
—Bill Hunter, "Facts are available" (letter to the editor), Topeka Capital Journal, October 5, 2000
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