whack 'whacked'

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Mar 16, 2004, at 5:35 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:

>> 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?]

NSOED2 thinks "jack (off)" 'masturbate' is a development from the noun
"jack" 'man', itself from the proper name.  it thinks "wank (off)" is
of unknown origin.

other masturbatory expressions are pretty clearly derived from verbs of
contact: beat off, toss (off), w(h)ack off, spank the monkey.

in any case, it *is* true that references to masturbation tend to
extend their meanings to cover 'inconsequential', 'worthless',
'contemptible'.  but the meanings of adjective "w(h)ack" that i'm
seeing extend out from 'out of kilter, messed up' -- cf. "w(h)acko" --
to 'wrong, bad', and so just barely overlap with the semantics of the
masturbatory expressions.  on semantic grounds, "w(h)ack (off)" is not
a very likely source for adjective "w(h)ack".

on syntactic grounds, it looks hopeless.  first, there's the fact that
the early uses of the adjective are predicative, and it's hard to see
how verbs could end up in this function.  but let's look at adnominal
uses, assuming that somehow they're the earlier ones.  these sound
fishy to me if the "off" is preserved:
   ??This is a really whack-off party.  [*not* describing a masturbatory
gathering]
and there are no parallels, so far as i know, for other masturbatory
verbs, with or without the "off":
   ??This is a really beat(-off)/wank(-off)/jack(-off) party.

but if someone has citations for these sorts of things, i'll take doug
wilson's speculation more seriously.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)