If you ask people what started them square dancing, you may hear such words as ``forced'' or ``dragged,'' as in: ``Basically, I was dragged there by my wife.''

The more enthusiastic may say: ``It was a combination of being willing and being taken there by grandma.''

But after the baptism, something magic seems to happen. Joe Dehn of Palo Alto, who was definitely dragged, now square dances every day and is on the board of the Santa Clara Valley Square Dancers Association. The only-somewhat-willing Julia LaChance, 14, is now a regular. ``I like the patterns because I like math,'' she said. ``I'm a geek.''

Bill van Melle had to be strongly encouraged by his girlfriend about 20 years ago. She scored big: Now Pat is Bill's wife, and the couple is a mainstay of the Stanford Quads.

``There are people who get really addicted to it,'' Bill van Melle said.

Dehn, 49, is definitely one of them. He has square danced every day since March 24 -- 192 days as of Thursday.

The Quads began as a Stanford campus club but expanded to serve the Bay Area and beyond. The club offers dances and classes for teens through seniors. It will start offering beginner classes Sunday in Palo Alto.

Learning to square dance is primarily a matter of memorizing the calls and the moves that go with them. Each call represents a pattern and each has a name, so when the caller shouts it out, the eight people in a square move into formation.

``The caller puts the moves together in ways that the dancers haven't heard before, so they don't know what's coming next,'' van Melle said. ``That is some of the fun.''

The calls have been standardized by CALLERLAB, a professional group of callers, so anyone anywhere in the world can recognize them. Though the dancing may be in Japan or Germany, the calls are always spoken in English.

Uniform calls are a fairly recent innovation. In fact, square dancing almost died out by the 1920s because calls had become so individualized that dancers in one region couldn't dance in another. Henry Ford helped bring back the dancing in the 1930s and began the modernization that replaced the hillbilly band with a combo, the barn with a civic center and the whiny-voiced caller with an articulate professional.

By the '70s, the practiced set of dances became more spontaneous. Earlier, dancers memorized a certain pattern to a particular song; the caller was there only to remind them what to do. New unscripted call combinations gave the dancing more vitality.

The levels of proficiency are based not on dancing expertise but on the number of calls a dancer knows. Julia and her 12-year-old sister, Michelle, are at a fairly advanced level after two years of dancing and know about 80 to 100 calls, said their grandmother Barbara Winnett, 61.

The continual updating brought many more people into square dancing, said Julia's mother, Debbie Winnett, 39, a two-decade veteran. The family comes to Palo Alto from San Bruno for the Quads' dances.

Debbie Winnett is something of a traditionalist. She still wears the old-style dresses with the stiff petticoats -- ``You can do the can-can in the costumes.'' But many dancers wear ``prairie skirts,'' floor-length straight skirts; some even wear jeans.

Michelle likes the dresses -- and the dancing. ``It's cool,'' she said. ``My friends like it, too. I have to drag them in, but they like it.''

There's that word again.

``As you can see,'' Barbara Winnett said, ``it develops by generations.'' Her daughter got her first taste of square dancing when she was 13 or 14 for one simple reason: Mom wanted to go square dancing, and there was nothing else to do but take the daughter along.

``I'm the instigator,'' Barbara Winnett said, laughing.

Now Barbara Winnett is trying to talk her 82-year-old mother, Lucille, into going to a Quads class.

``Four generations on the same floor,'' she said. ``You don't see that very often.''