whack 'whacked'

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

from a poster on the newsgroup soc.motss, about the No Child Left
Behind act (in a thread named after my new granddaughter!):
   How whack is that?

this was new to me, but then i often come in late to the great opera of
language change.  what we have here is clearly an adjective "whack" --
note modification by degree "how" here and by other adverbs in examples
like the following, from google searches:
   Elite Force is totally whack.
   That night I had a really whack dream.
and by its ability to coordinate with adjectives:
   ...noticed how WHACK, CORNY, and OBVIOUS everybody is...

unlike the innovative adjective "fun" ("We had a very fun time"), which
derives historically from a noun, the innovative adjective "whack" is
almost surely derived historically from the verb form "whacked", in its
slang sense 'messed up, fucked (up), screwed (up), twisted', eventually
with a range of meanings going from the mild 'awry, out of the
ordinary' to the stronger 'wrong, bad'.  (i was at least familiar with
this lexical item "whacked".)  the semantics of "whacked " is
presumably an extension from the contact-verb sense, perhaps influenced
by the phonologically similar "wacky" (which is itself probably
originally "whacky", possibly related to "out of whack"), and/or by the
slang "whacked out".  or maybe the adjective "whack" comes directly
from the noun "whack" of "out of whack" (presumably a nominalization of
the contact verb), though that wouldn't explain the fact that the
adjectives "whack" and "whacked" have almost the same range of meanings
and syntactic contexts.

(along the way i discovered the site urbandictionary.com, which bills
itself as "a slang dictionary with *your definitions*".  for "this is
whack", users had supplied the meanings "messed up, un[u]sual, more
fucked up than usual".)

some issues and observations:

1.  if adjective "whack" is directly related to "whacked", then we have
an unusual loss of final /t/.  well, yes, it follows a consonant, in
fact a stop, which is a high-frequency context for the famous
t/d-deletion.  but the /t/ loss would seem to have been lexicalized
here, and not in otherwise parallel forms  like "fucked": "That's
really fucked" might be pronounced in fast, casual speech without its
/t/, but i don't see any evidence of lexicalization here, in written
versions like "That's really fuck."

ok, lexicalization is often sporadic, and maybe that's all there is to
say here.

2.  a pretty large number of occurrences of adjective "whack" are in a
few formulas:
   That would be whack!
   How whack!
and the rhetorical question i started with above:
   How whack is that?

it *might* be that the adjective extended from a few fixed phrases like
these.  has anyone looked at its development, by dating occurrences?
(i have no idea how long it's been around, since i've just started
looking at it.)

3.  like a good colloquial adjective, "whack" has (unsuffixed)
adverbial uses:
   ...I realized how whack and wrong we did it...

there are a few occurrences of adverbial "whackly", both as a V(P)
adverbial --
   [rap]  ...you diss so whackly only reason ya lines go over my head
     is 'cause they miss so badly!!
   ...some whackly pronounced Japanese phrase you've picked up...
  and as a simply adadjectival modifier --
   ...wow 6flags yesterday was whackly insane...

i'll bet there are people with adjective "whack" who reject "whackly".
i myself am getting into "whack", but "whackly" is still out of range
for me.

4.  in fact, the adnominal uses of "whack" strike me as much less
felicitous than the predicative uses; the following attested examples
are something of a stretch for me:
   The kid went on a really whack trip; he thought he was doing something
     righteous and it all went awry...
   ...whoever lives here has a really whack sense of reality...

if the earliest uses of adjective "whack" were predicative, this would
make sense: people could pick it up only in predicative uses (there
are, after all, predicative-only adjectives), or they could extend it
to adnominal uses.  in which case, there should be people who accept
the predicative uses but not the adnominal ones (but not vice versa).

5.  "whack" can be predicated either of inanimates (circumstances,
situations, objects)  --
   ...know exactly how whack it is to be a "TURK".
   ...just how whack it is to smoke pot...
   ...how whack is that shit?
   Crack is whack.  [Whitney Houston]
   Why Psychology is Whack
or persons --
   ...any hypothesized claim on just how whack I am...
   ...we must be whack!

6.  i've found a few occurrences that don't seem to fit in the usual
semantic range for adjective "whack".  in particular, there are some
apparently positive uses, like the following, which seems to have been
intended as praise:
   ...Sunspot Jonz adds a really whack beat...

now, this could be semantic inversion (like "baaad' 'excellent').  or
it could be a separate "whack", related to the positive modifier
"whack-ass", as in:
   ...putting subscriptions in a really whack-ass folder...

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)