whack 'whacked'

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Mar 17, 2004, at 3:27 PM, Doug Wilson continues the discussion:

1. what's at issue

> I would speculate that "wack"/"whack" went its own way and the earlier
> form
> was forgotten ... whether it was "whack-off", "wacky", or "whacked", or
> even "out of whack".

well, of course.  speakers rarely have any sense of the historical
origins of the expressions they use, and even if they have opinions on
the matter these aren't necessarily correct.  to make things more
vexing for the linguist, there isn't necessarily a single source for or
influence on the development of expressions.

when i stumbled onto the topic of adjective "w(h)ack", i had two
interests: figuring out how it is used -- what its syntax and semantics
are -- and figuring out where it came from.  i hadn't appreciated just
how complicated the second task was going to be.  though i shouldn't
have been so surprised, i guess: the development of (what i'll call,
for the lack of a better term) demotic vocabulary is notoriously hard
to track, not to mention full of idiosyncratic events (syntactically
and semantically parallel items often fail to shift in the same way)
and multiple influences.  looking at one item quickly entangles you in
a bunch of others, and the puzzles only multiply.

search engines now provide us with vast corpora of demotic writing.  a
truly wonderful resource, but it helps very little with the historical
questions, since these rich resources are historically very shallow and
since (as with all sorts of corpora) it can be very hard to divine the
writer's intentions from the context.  even the synchronic questions
can be explored only so far; as i'll point out below, all sorts of
important variation can be concealed in the corpora, and the corpora
provide no negative evidence (only absence or rarity of positive
evidence).

but... we can now find all sorts of things.  ron butters has noted
adjective "dick" (as in "so dick") and adjective "suck" (as in "how
suck"), and larry horn has chimed in with [british] adjective "wank"
(as in "really wank"), and it seems extremely unlikely that these three
innovative adjectives and adjective "w(h)ack" have a common source.  it
is not, in fact, at all clear that they have similar semantics (beyond
their all involving negative judgments) or similar syntax.

on to some specifics.

2.  "jack off"

>  I doubt
> "jack off" from "jack" = "man" (where are "man off", "bloke off", "guy
> off", "tom off", "joe off"?);  I suspect "jack" is basically like
> "jack up
> the car to change the tire"...

well, NSOED2 entry allows for the possibility that the masturbation
sense comes from the contact-verb sense, which in turn comes from the
'man' sense.

the failure of generalization, to other nouns generically denoting men,
would be no surprise.  consider "jerk off", involving what almost
everyone agrees involves the contact verb "jerk" (an obvious figure,
parallel to "beat off" and "toss off" and "whack off" [all, i believe,
dialectally restricted]).  there are plenty of excellent candidates for
a parallel development, but if any of them have occurred, they haven't
caught on: whip off, churn off, shake off, pluck off, flutter off,
wallop off, wag off, jog off, jounce off, stir off, push off, pull off,
touch off, feel off, finger off, stroke off, flick off, flip off, wipe
off, sweep off, hit off, pinch off, fiddle off, grope off, pat off,
grab off, scrape off, brush off, wipe off, hand off, scratch off,
tickle off, throw off, spray off, splash off, hurl off, slap off,...

what is, is.  (and what is not, is not.)

any of these is possible as an original, genuinely creative (even
poetic) verb for masturbation -- "whip off" and "stroke off" seem to me
to be particularly good images -- but none of them has, so far as i
know, been conventionalized, and certainly none of them has been
*generally* conventionalized in demotic english.  that fact doesn't in
the slightest undercut the proposal that "jerk off" is historically
derived from the verb "jerk".

when i last engaged in a discussion on the origins of "jack off" -- on
the OUTIL mailing list -- almost every imaginable proposal relating
various items "jack", "jerk", and "jag" was floated, and the available
evidence didn't absolutely rule out any of these speculations.  it was
a sobering experience for me.

3.  predicative vs. adnominal

> Is it really certain that the early use [of adjective "w(h)ack"] was
> predicative? Searching Google groups, I find "wack ideas" earlier than
> "that's wack" (1992 vs. 1994) ...
> of course the material is sparse in the early days and I'm sure this
> was
> around in the 1980's.

no, not at all certain.  but i *am* aware of asymmetries in predicative
vs. adnominal uses of modifiers (including in demotic english), so i
was primed to expect them here.

so: i know of speakers with predicative-only modifiers, for instance
"mad + Adj", as in "mad cracked" 'very crazy' (He's mad cracked.  *a
mad cracked guy) and other speakers with adnominal-only "Adj-"ass", as
in "huge-ass" 'really huge' (a huge-ass homework assignment; *The
homework assignment was huge-ass.).

the facts are complicated.  in each case, i think, there are speakers
with *both* uses (predicative and adnominal), so if you do a google
search, you're going to find occurrences of both, and you won't see any
restriction.  to see that there is a restriction, you have to look at
the usage of *individual speakers*, and you have to get judgments about
what they *can't/wouldn't/don't* say as well as judgments about what
they can/would/do say.

my guess was that some speakers had predicative-only adjective
"w(h)ack", and that none had only the adnominal uses.  (clearly, many
speakers have both.)  i could be wrong, but we have to examine
individual speakers to find out.  if i'm right, the suggestion is that
the predicative uses are historically earlier.  or if the asymmetry
goes the other way, then the suggestion is that the adnominal uses are
historically earlier (as doug wilson favors).  and if there's no
asymmetry, then who knows?

4.  adjective w(h)ack/suck/dick/wank and their sources

all sorts of suggestions about the source of adjective "w(h)ack".  note
that i suggested that there might be two rather different items and two
different sources, negative-affect "w(h)ack" '[metaphorically] fucked'
and positive-affect "w(h)ack" 'whack-ass'.

then there's adjective "suck", as in this example that barry popik just
  posted in the kitten-oven-biscuit thread:

--------------
(GOOGLE)
GameDev.net - User Profile - Jimmy The Nose
... Yeah whatever. Eminem is suck and Moby is OK. <i>A cat born in an
oven
is not a cake. </i> ... "Abortion thread closed' closed!?" closed!? ...
www.gamedev.net/profile/profile.asp?id=15938 - 24k - Cached - Similar
pages
--------------

guesses: "suck" from adjective "sucky", related to intransitive
derogatory "suck", or direct from that verb.  semantics pretty good.
conversion mechanism obscure in either case.

adjective 'dick': could be related to the diminishing mass noun "dick",
as in
   You don't know beans/dick/shit/crap/jack... about linguistics.
could be a clipping of "dick-ass", in either its diminishing sense or
its V+N sense (parallel to "fuck-ass") or both.

(suffixoid "-ass" has a complex distribution: with adjectivals, as an
intensifier: "huge-ass", "monster-ass"; with nouns, in a compound with
a noun, as in "shit-ass" (modifier semantics) and "fuck-ass" and
"whack-ass" (verb+object semantics); and with an element of obscure
category, as in [positive] "whoop-ass".  the straightforward
intensifier uses convert adjectivals to adjectivals, but the other uses
yield adjectivals from items that, historically at least, are not
usable as adjectivals themselves: a whoop-ass party, *a whoop party.)

as for adjective "wank", it could be derived from "wank-off" or from
the noun "wank" 'wanker', as in "he's a real wank", via noun-noun
compounds like "a wank party" 'a party of the sort that wanks go to'
(like "a nerd party").  or possibly other things.

it's a wild world out there, and we don't know jack...or dick...about
much of it.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)