What is "scooterboy"

n. A male member of a 1960s mod subculture who rode motor scooters and wore anoraks, wide jeans, and boots.

A scooterboy (or scooter boy) is one of several scooter-related subcultures of the 1960s and later decades, alongside rude boys, mods and skinheads. The term is sometimes used as a catch-all designation for any scootering enthusiast who does not fall into the latter three categories. Michael Brake identifies the subculture differently, classifying it as a subgroup of the mods, alongside "art school mods", "mainstream mods", and "hard mods". Scooter boys, according to Brake, had "Italian motor scooters (a working-class sports car) covered in accessories and anoraks and wide jeans".

According to Colin Shattuck and Eric Peterson, a scooter boy is more specifically, "one who attends scooter rallies and accumulates event patches on a garment of some kind". The garment is conventionally a flight jacket, but can be any of several other types of jacket, a mechanic's, a motorcyclist's, or even a parka. According to Kayleen Hazlehurst, the scooterboy with anorak, accessory-covered scooter and industrial work boots was a late-1960s/early-1970s halfway house between the mods and the skinheads.

Music biographer Mick Middles observes that the flight-jacketed scooter boy with Dr. Martens shoes was a slightly different image, favoured by scooter boys in the late 1970s scooter revival. He describes the Lambretta boom period from 1968 to 1973 as featuring:

[g]iant packs of scooter boys surg[ing] out every Sunday from the big Lancashire towns ... avoiding the faster, dirtier motorbiking 'greasers' and clashing with each other in Blackpool and Southport. Those were the days of Crombie coats and two-tone 'tonic' trousers, of brogues ... and Barathea blazers, of smartness, neatness, in clothes as in music.

He characterises the late 1970s revival, in contrast, as "something of an oddity", in which scooter owners were "more concerned with the machine — the mechanics, the practicalities — than the look.

A scooter boy is also a common noun used in Mad Libs games. It is often used in reference to male adults who love scootering around town instead of driving or walking.