A stranger shows up at an intimate room party? Random.

Run into your old IHUM professor at In ‘n Out? Random.

A freshman emerges from his RA’s room, clad only in boxers, at five in the morning? Random (and pretty sketchy, too).

Yes, here at Stanford, anything can be random, from the onset of a caterpillar plague to the presence of a techie in an Art History class.

But what makes something random? These events aren’t simply unexpected; they clash with our deep-seated assumptions about the way things work. Room parties are for close friends, professors exist only in lecture halls, and RAs don’t — or shouldn’t, anyway — hook up with their freshmen. This is just how life in the Stanford bubble goes.

To our generation, “random” is no longer a mathematical term of probability. Instead, it’s become one of the most ubiquitous words in our colorful lexicon, and we’ll use it to describe anything that deviates from a social norm. “Random,” my parents insist, has become to us what words like “groovy” and “neat” were to them. We have embraced this adjective and made it our own.

And then of course, there’s the random hookup.

While most students can agree on the range of activity covered by a hookup (anything from making out to sex, but usually something in between), the random hookup has yet to be defined.

So what, then, makes a hookup random? What factors qualify one as random, and what underlying assumptions about our world does it violate?

Sociolinguist William Labov once conducted a famous experiment in which he asked subjects to label a number of containers as either a cup or a mug. Participants agreed on each object, until Labov began to play with their dimensions and features. When subjects were asked to identify these new, unusual objects, many did not fall consistently into one category or another. To each participant, the semantic boundaries of the words “cup” and “mug” were slightly different.

In the same way, a random hookup can mean different things to different people. Though the phrase conjures the equivalent of a one-night stand, an alcohol-induced encounter between two strangers, the term can stretch far beyond that usage.

Some qualify a hookup as random only if they’ve never met the other person before that night. Others insist that — even if the two are friendly acquaintances — it’s still random. For others, a random hookup is any one that involves a person they have no genuine romantic interest in.

To my surprise, the Stanford students I spoke to overwhelmingly identified with the last two definitions. Hooking up with people we don’t really know (let alone, like) is not something we consider normal. Regardless of how frequently these hookups may occur, we seem to understand them as some sort of aberration. As sexually liberated as we are today, as accepted as the hookup is, we still think it’s fundamentally...well, random.

Despite what our parents might think, maybe we haven’t lost all their old-fashioned romantic sentiment. Maybe, deep down — past the hormones and alcohol flooding our blood stream — we’re not looking for easy action with a side of regret. Maybe what we truly want is something meaningful, a wholly un-random connection in the midst of this chaos we call college.