sarging

Definition

To sarge is to go out and practise "pickup" — deliberately approaching women to try to attract them. Wiktionary records the noun bluntly as "The act of sarging" and marks the whole family of words as seduction-community vocabulary. ^[1] The framing matters: in this world approaching strangers is treated as a trainable skill, done in sessions and written up afterwards, rather than as something that happens in the course of ordinary life. Wikipedia notes that pick-up how-to guides "encourage men to meet women through the 'pickup'". ^[2]

Where it comes from

The term grew out of the early online seduction community. Wiktionary's earliest quotation for "sarging" is a 1999 "field report" posted to the newsgroup alt.seduction.fast — the archetypal genre of the scene, a write-up of an attempt. ^[1] That newsgroup was founded in 1994 by a student of Ross Jeffries, the workshop teacher who from 1988 promoted a set of neuro-linguistic-programming techniques he branded "speed seduction"; the group in turn spawned a wider network of seduction forums and mailing lists. ^[2]

In the manosphere

Sarging names the core activity the rest of the pick-up vocabulary is built around — the outing on which an opener is delivered, an approach-anxiety is pushed through, and a wingman may come along. It belongs to the pickup-artistry tradition popularised by The Game. The word itself is low-harm; its value here is as a reliable marker of that world, one of the more insider terms a person picks up only after some immersion in it.