Re: whack 'whacked'

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

On a hunch, I tried a Google search for "How suck is that?" 

I found three pages of solid examples.

Sample: "I like your attitude..
That war was an excuse for getting oil. I think Bush wanted to continue his 
father policy. How suck is that. I wonder why nobody had done anything with 
iraq for the last few years and all of a sudden a total nation comes up against 
it. USA is weird. But thats ok, My country isnt better.."


In a message dated 3/16/04 1:49:26 PM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes:


> 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)
> 
>