The S Thing Everyone Drew But Nobody Taught

I watched my daughter draw it last Tuesday. She was sitting at the kitchen table with a worksheet she'd already finished, killing time with a pencil, and there it was. Six vertical lines in two columns. Connect the top, connect the bottom, weave the midpoints into angles. The S. The S. The same one I drew on the back of my Earth Science folder in 1996. The same one my older cousin drew on his Trapper Keeper in 1989. The same one - apparently - that kids have been drawing on every flat surface in every school in the Western world for decades, maybe longer, and nobody knows why.

I put my coffee down. "Where did you learn that?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. Everybody draws it."

Yeah. Everybody draws it. That's the whole point. That's the whole mystery.

The Procedure

If you grew up in America between roughly 1970 and today, you know the steps. You might not remember learning them, but you know them. They're somewhere in your muscle memory, filed between tying your shoes and that hand-clapping game with the rhyme about Miss Mary Mack.

You draw three vertical lines. Then three more, parallel, just to the right. You cap the top two outer lines with a V shape pointing up. Same thing on the bottom, pointing down. Then you connect the inner points diagonally - top left to middle right, top right to middle left - and suddenly, like a magic trick performed in ballpoint pen, a woven, interlocking S appears.

It looked cool. That was the thing. It looked like it belonged on the side of a van, or a skateboard deck, or the chest plate of some superhero nobody had invented yet. It looked professional, like something an adult designed, except you just made it with a Bic pen during third period while your teacher was explaining the water cycle.

It looked professional, like something an adult designed, except you just made it with a Bic pen during third period while your teacher was explaining the water cycle.

The Name Problem

We called it the Stussy S. That's what everyone in my middle school called it, at least. The rumor was that it came from the surfwear brand Stussy - that it was their logo, or a secret version of their logo, or something a Stussy designer had sketched on a napkin that leaked into the culture. This sounded plausible in 1995. We didn't have the internet in any useful way. You couldn't just look things up. If a kid with an older brother said it was the Stussy S, it was the Stussy S.

Except it wasn't. Stussy has said, repeatedly, that the S has nothing to do with them. Their actual logo is a stylized signature, not the interlocking pointed thing we all drew. The Stussy theory is a dead end, one of many.

Other kids called it the Super S. Or the Cool S. Or just "that S thing." The fact that it doesn't even have a real name tells you something. It predates branding. It predates the internet. It might predate any single person's memory.

The Theories

People have tried to trace it. Seriously tried. There's a whole Wikipedia article about it now, which is exactly the kind of thing that would have blown my twelve-year-old mind. Researchers, graphic designers, and internet obsessives have chased the S back through decades, looking for an origin, and nobody has found one that sticks.

Some people claim it goes back to the 1950s or even earlier. There are alleged sightings in medieval manuscripts, though those tend to fall apart under scrutiny. The most honest answer anyone has come up with is: we don't know. It might be the most successful piece of folk art in human history, and its creator - if there even was a single creator - is completely anonymous.

That's kind of incredible when you think about it. In a world where we can trace the origin of every meme to a specific Tumblr post from 2013, the S just sits there, unattributed, eternal, smirking.

The Democracy of It

Here's the part that gets me, the part I keep thinking about. The S didn't belong to anyone. Not to the cool kids, not to the skaters, not to the nerds, not to the jocks. Everybody drew it. Everybody. The kid who was really into anime drew it. The kid who played JV football drew it. The quiet girl in the back row who never talked to anyone drew it. The class clown drew it huge across the back of his notebook. The straight-A student drew it tiny in the margin of her notes.

It crossed every social boundary that middle school spent so much energy constructing. In a cafeteria where you couldn't sit at the wrong table without consequences, the S was universal currency. It was the one thing everyone agreed was cool, which is basically a miracle when you're talking about thirteen-year-olds.

In a cafeteria where you couldn't sit at the wrong table without consequences, the S was universal currency.

No one was good at drawing the S and no one was bad at it. That was part of the magic. It was democratic in a way that almost nothing else in childhood is. You didn't need talent. You didn't need supplies. You needed six lines, a few connections, and the thirty seconds of instruction you got from whoever sat next to you in homeroom.

The Satisfaction

I think the reason it persists - the reason my daughter drew it without knowing what it was or where it came from - is that the S is one of the most satisfying things you can do with a pencil. The geometry is perfect. You start with something that looks like nothing, just parallel lines, and through a series of logical steps, this elegant interlocking shape appears. It feels like a magic trick you're performing on yourself.

There's a moment in the middle, right when you're connecting the diagonal lines, where the S clicks into existence. Before that, it's just scaffolding. After that, it's a thing. A real thing. Something that looks designed, intentional, almost three-dimensional. You made it. On a desk. During social studies. With a pencil you've been chewing on.

For a lot of kids, it might have been the first time they made something that looked genuinely cool. Not a wobbly house with smoke coming out of the chimney. Not a stick figure family with a yellow sun in the corner. Something that looked like it belonged somewhere - on a wall, on a logo, on the side of something fast.

Still Here

The S has outlived Stussy as a cultural force. It's outlived the Trapper Keeper. It's outlived the specific brands of pens we used to draw it. It's outlived the desks we carved it into, most of which have been replaced by now. It's probably outlived some of the schools. And it's still going, passed from kid to kid the same way it always was - not through YouTube tutorials or TikTok, but through the oldest technology humans have. One person shows another person, who shows another person, who shows another person.

No one gets credit. No one gets royalties. No one even gets acknowledged. It just keeps moving through the population like a benign virus, replicating itself in notebook margins and on dusty chalkboards and across the foggy windows of school buses.

My daughter finished her S and moved on to drawing a cat. She'll probably never think about the S again until she sees her own kid drawing one someday, in some kitchen that doesn't exist yet, and feels that same jolt I felt - the weird, warm shock of watching something you thought was yours turn out to be everyone's, and older than you ever imagined, and completely unexplained.

Six lines. A few connections. The most persistent mystery in the history of doodling. And still, after all these years, nobody knows where it came from. Maybe that's the best part. Some things don't need an origin story. They just need a pencil and a bored kid and the thirty seconds between one class and the next.