whack 'whacked'

[Douglas G. Wilson]

>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".)

I haven't looked into it very carefully, but my casual notion would be that
this "wack" = "whack" is from "whack[off]" = "masturbate". Pretty much
analogous development is seen in "jagoff" which is used like
"stupid/contemptible [person]", often without perception of the underlying
"jackoff" = "masturbate[r]". And the English presumed cognate "wank[er]"
(originally "whank[er]", I think) has similar development. [The ultimate
etymology of these is probably onanatopoeic, right?]

The novelty might be the predicative use (as well as the loss of "off" ...
or is/was "whack" commonly used alone in some regions or milieux [like
"wank" apparently is in England])?

>1.  if adjective "whack" is directly related to "whacked", then we have
>an unusual loss of final /t/.

I would speculate that this /t/-loss did not occur, and that the earlier
version was "whack[off]" [adj.] = "jack-off" meaning roughly
"stupid"/"contemptible".

Just an idle thought.

-- Doug Wilson