whack 'whacked'

[Laurence Horn]

Along the lines of these observations of Doug's, and Ron's
google-scouting of "really dick" etc., I checked "really wank", and
it too yields a plethora of pejorative uses of this type, presuambly
Brit counterparts of "really w(h)ack".   There are 197 google hits
for "really wank"; while some are irrelevant--'This isn't really
"wank writing" - it's too complex for that'-- most correspond to the
desired sense.)

larry horn


At 8:35 PM -0500 3/16/04, 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?]
>
>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