🪰 Every Gen X Kid Knows This Mysterious ‘S’ Doodle. But Nobody Knows Where It Came From

Picture yourself sitting in a high school classroom sometime around 1983. You’ve got your Trapper Keeper open, a Walkman hidden in your backpack, and a teacher at the front of the room explaining something about fractions that you’ve completely zoned out of.

Your notebook is already covered in doodles. Maybe you’ve drawn your favorite band’s logo, a few hearts around somebody’s initials, or one of those ridiculously elaborate block-letter versions of your own name.

And then the kid sitting next to you leans over and shows you something.

He draws three short vertical lines, leaves a little space, and draws three more underneath. Then he starts connecting them with diagonal strokes until something almost magical happens…

Suddenly, there’s this incredibly cool, three-dimensional-looking letter S staring back at you.

HOLY CRAP.

You immediately try drawing one yourself, and after a couple of embarrassing attempts, you’ve mastered what might be the single greatest artistic achievement of your entire ninth-grade career.

Naturally, you proceed to draw it on every available surface.

Your notebook, textbook covers, Trapper Keeper, Pee-Chee folder, bathroom walls, the inside of your locker, and possibly a school desk or two.

And if you’re a Gen Xer reading this right now, I’m betting you know EXACTLY which S I’m talking about.

Yep. There she is, in all her S glory.

But here’s something that’s going to blow your mind.

Nobody seems to know who invented the damn thing…

Seriously.

An entire generation of American kids somehow learned to draw this strange little symbol, despite there being no obvious company, television show, advertising campaign, or official organization promoting it.

And it gets even weirder.

Kids in other countries were apparently drawing the same symbol, too, sometimes thousands of miles away from one another.

So how the hell did everybody know about it?

And why, after all these years, can so many of us still remember exactly how to draw it?

Well, we’ve got a few historical clues, some rather strange theories, and one very hilarious conspiracy involving the possibility that Gen X accidentally broke the universe.

Are you ready? Let’s get into it.

DID GEN X ACCIDENTALLY BREAK THE SIMULATION?

First, we need to acknowledge that the internet has recently discovered something rather amusing about our beloved childhood doodle.

Apparently, there’s a theory floating around that this mysterious S is actually the logo of whatever company is supposedly operating our simulated reality.

Yes, that’s the story floating around.

According to this hilarious internet theory, Gen X might have been unknowingly keeping the entire simulation running smoothly every time we drew that weird little S. But then we grew up, stopped drawing it, and apparently whoever’s running this operation cranked the difficulty setting up to eleven.

So maybe it’s time to grab a pencil and see if we can reboot the damn universe.

This video I stumbled upon offers a wonderfully absurd explanation for why we all knew how to draw that same little symbol and what might’ve happened when we finally put down our pencils and Sharpies.

MAYBE WE SHOULD START DRAWING IT AGAIN

Okay, I have to admit, the idea that Gen X was accidentally maintaining the stability of the entire universe by repeatedly drawing a pointy S on our homework is pretty damn awesome.

And when you think about how bad things have been going lately, maybe somebody should dig out an old Mead notebook and give it another shot.

But the really interesting part of this whole thing isn’t the simulation theory, which is obviously just a fun internet conspiracy…. maybe.

It’s the fact that our mysterious little symbol was practically everywhere, and nobody seemed to question it.

We all knew how to draw it. Our friends knew, kids in other schools knew… it was like this unspoken “symbol” everybody knew about.

And we all inherited this peculiar little piece of childhood doodle culture without having the slightest idea where it came from.

Well, it turns out people have been trying to solve this mystery for years.

And some of the earliest evidence takes us back way further than the 1980s.

THE MYSTERY STARTED BEFORE OUR FIRST TRAPPER KEEPERS

Here’s something that might surprise you.

Our beloved S was already circulating before many Gen X kids had even reached middle school.

In 2016, writer Andrea James explored the mysterious doodle for Boing Boing and recalled seeing it as far back as 1978.

Back then, she remembered kids incorporating the symbol into handwritten notes passed between classmates, including a little signature involving the words “Sorry So Sloppy.”

You remember passing notes in class, right?

You’d spend half the period folding a sheet of notebook paper into some elaborate little triangle, then arrange an entire underground delivery operation involving three classmates just to ask whether somebody liked somebody else.

And apparently, our mysterious S was already part of that world.

Now we know this S doodle wasn’t just some random fad that appeared during the 80s.

It was already familiar to schoolchildren in the previous decade. So, if the symbol existed before the brands and pop-culture trends we associated with it, where did it actually come from?

Well, one popular explanation involves a clothing company that practically every teenager from that era will recognize.

WAIT, WASN’T IT THE STÜSSY LOGO?

If you grew up during the 1980s or 1990s, there’s a pretty good chance somebody told you that strange S was connected to Stüssy.

Remember that brand?

The California surfwear company was really popular, and its handwritten logo appeared on T-shirts, hats, and all sorts of other crap.

So, some people started calling our mysterious classroom doodle the Stüssy S.

Case closed, right?

Absolutely not, dude.

In 2016, a journalist decided to investigate the symbol’s origins and contacted Stüssy directly.

And her answer was pretty definitive.

Vice:

“No, this is not an original Stussy Logo,” stated Emmy Coates, who has worked alongside Shawn Stussy since 1985.

Well, there goes that theory.

And Stüssy wasn’t the only famous name people tried attaching to the symbol.

Some thought it was connected to Superman, while others remembered it as some kind of graffiti emblem or heavy-metal band logo.

Honestly, I can see why…

That angular little S looked like something you’d find spray-painted on a subway wall or plastered across the back of a denim jacket worn by somebody with a mullet and a deeply disturbing Def Leppard obsession.

But VICE also contacted DC Comics, where an employee familiar with the Superman archives found no connection between the classroom doodle and the superhero’s famous logo.

So apparently, we’d spent years drawing a symbol that looked sorta like somebody’s logo but didn’t actually belong to the companies everybody kept naming.

Which makes the next discovery even stranger.

THE S WAS HIDING IN GRAFFITI LONG BEFORE WE WERE DRAWING IT IN SCHOOL

As researchers started digging way past childhood memories, they discovered something fascinating about the symbol. Apparently, it’d been showing up in urban graffiti years before its heyday on Gen X notebooks.

Photographer Jon Naar captured images of graffiti in New York City in 1973, and some of those photographs included the familiar angular S.

Now THAT is our S doodle.

So, it turns out while much of America was still listening to music on eight-track tapes, somebody was already drawing our mysterious symbol on the streets of New York.

It even appeared in artwork associated with Jean-Michel Basquiat during the early 1980s.

Could it be that our favorite classroom doodle came out of urban graffiti culture and slowly spread its way through communities until children picked it up and started copying it?

That certainly sounds plausible and pretty cool.

But then a YouTuber named LEMMiNO decided to take the investigation even further.

He spent approximately five years, on and off, trying to track down the origins of this peculiar little S.

And what he found takes us somewhere I honestly never expected.

HOLD ON. THIS THING MIGHT BE FROM THE 1800s?

Believe it or not, one of the most intriguing historical clues comes from an old instructional book published in 1890.

Yes, I said 1890.

The book was called Mechanical Graphics, and it contained technical drawings prepared by Frederick Newton Willson, a professor at Princeton University.

Check it out:

Among those illustrations was a stylized letter S bearing a striking resemblance to the little masterpiece we all drew in middle school and high school.

The design wasn’t identical to the modern version, but as you can see, it has a similar style.

Later, the S appeared in another of Willson’s books, where the style was identified as “railroad lettering.”

Of course, with our luck, there’s no chain of evidence proving that the drawing in Willson’s book somehow traveled from a nineteenth-century classroom into the notebooks of millions of twentieth-century teenagers.

But it does demonstrate that remarkably similar geometric lettering existed long before most of the other popular theories.

Somebody might’ve drawn a similar S in 1890. Somebody else was apparently putting it on New York walls in 1973. By the 1980s and 1990s, children all over the place were reproducing it on school walls and folders.

But how did it make those enormous jumps?

How did a geometric design become something so recognizable that millions of people could draw it from memory?

Remember, we weren’t exchanging memes on Instagram or watching YouTube tutorials during homeroom.

If you wanted to learn some neat little trick, somebody had to show you.

And that might be the most wonderfully old-fashioned part of this entire story.

THE ORIGINAL VIRAL MEME DIDN’T EVEN NEED THE INTERNET

There’s actually a name for the way children pass traditions, games, drawings, and little bits of knowledge between one another.

It’s called childlore, and our mysterious S is a terrific example of how that process works.

The University of Southern California’s Digital Folklore Archives even contains an entry about the Cool S, based on someone’s memories of learning it in elementary school.

The student researcher examining the tradition offered a rather simple explanation for how the symbol managed to travel so widely.

Folklore.usc:

I notice that this spread simply through children learning and teaching each other.

Now isn’t that something?

An entire cultural phenomenon may have spread through  one kid leaning over another kid’s desk and showing them how to connect six lines.

That jives, right? Remember all those ridiculous things we somehow learned growing up?

We knew how to make paper footballs and flick them across cafeteria tables. We could fold notes into these absurdly complicated little shapes, invent secret handshakes, and turn the number 80085 on a calculator into the funniest thing anybody had ever seen.

(   .     )V(    .     )

You get the picture…

The point is, nobody needed a national advertising campaign to teach us any of that stuff. We just learned it from other kids, like a giant game of telephone.

And unlike most of the nonsense we doodled during math class, this particular S had something really special going for it.

It was incredibly easy to learn, looked really impressive when finished, and gave even the most artistically challenged kid the ability to draw something that was genuinely cool.

There was something oddly satisfying about watching those disconnected lines suddenly become that truly recognizable symbol.

Once somebody showed you the trick, you wanted to draw another one.

And then another… and before long, your entire notebook looked like you’d joined some mysterious geometric cult.

The funny thing is that none of us really needed to know what the S meant.

Just knowing how to draw it was enough.

SO WHO ACTUALLY INVENTED THE DAMN THING?

After all these years of investigating, interviewing people, digging through old photographs, examining artwork, and searching historical documents, we still don’t have a definitive answer.

We’ve found evidence that the symbol predates its popularity among Gen X kids, and we’ve uncovered geometric designs that resemble it from more than a century ago.

But identifying the person who first created the exact version we all recognize remains an unsolved mystery.

And maybe that’s the best way to leave it.

Because the thing I love most about this story isn’t the possibility that some long-forgotten professor invented our favorite S doodle or that it might have originated on a graffiti-covered wall… what I love is realizing that millions of us Gen X kids shared this peculiar little childhood experience without ever knowing how far it reached.

We were just kids trying to survive another painfully boring school day, filling the margins of our notebooks with something that made us feel ridiculously talented for about 30 seconds. And along the way, those little drawings became part of a shared cultural memory.

And decades later, all it takes is one photograph of that pointy S to transport us straight back into our old classrooms.

I swear, I can practically smell the pencil shavings.

For all the technology we’ve developed since the 80s, there’s something so freaking nostalgic about a phenomenon that spread without an algorithm, a social media platform, or some marketing dork trying to make it go viral.

The mysterious S doodle didn’t need any of that stuff.

It just needed a few bored kids, some notebook paper, and enough free time before the bell rang.

As for the idea that Gen X accidentally destabilized the simulation when we stopped drawing it? Well, considering the state of the world, maybe we should all try drawing a few more, just to be safe.

At this point, what’ve we got to lose?