whack 'whacked'

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:03 PM -0800 3/19/04, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>
>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.

Not that this affects Arnold's point, but "stroke off" *is*
conventionalized, as both my intuition and a quick look at google
confirms, and for both intransitive and transitive uses.  Maybe it
goes into the "dialectally restricted" group, although I suspect the
dialects in question are not regionally delineated.

larry horn