whack: a cool rule?

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 3/19/04 3:03:57 PM, zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU writes:


> 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.
> 

What I was implying (not very clearly, because still somewhat inchoate in my 
own mind) was that there could be an interactive process here, based partly on 
phonology. That is to say, suppose that speakers associate "That is so wack" 
(or "whack"--how many people actually aspirate /w/ these days?) with "wacked" 
and/or "wacky" and think of deletion of the grammatical/derivational suffix as 
a rule for the cool (hearing it first in counterculture contexts, where it 
apparently first arose). These would-be cool people would then generalize the 
cool rule to other /k/-final pejorative stems, i.e., "dick," "suck," "fuck," and 
even "wank." (Of course, this use of "so" is in itself a cool rule or set of 
rules.)

One would predict that we would begin to get constructions such as "That is 
so jerk" (especially since appositive "jerk" is already possible, as in "As it 
turns out, marrying a millionaire was a jerk idea."
www.detnews.com/2000/religion/0002/25/). Here is an example of the putative 
older form:

I've been quite unfair really, not all me boyfriends were jerks - but each 
and every
one of them have done things so jerk-ish (thats why theyre exs) and ive ...
www.wideworldofass.com/dinkee/979412526.html

I also find the following, but since the speaker is not (it seems) a native 
speaker of English, this is not very useful:

 ... i write in english,and some of you will translate it. i feel so jerk
,because
i never really know,what i am really saying,when i write hungarian. ...
pride.hu/ viewtopic.php?topic=10&forum=1&start=390

However, I do in fact I do find:

 ... That people should kn. If You Only Knew Posted on Jan 03. Categories: 
Lyrics.
Critical. If you only knew about me you wouldn't be so jerk to me. ...
oldpoetry.com/poets/Talliegirl23

 ... threads on the ways of the rest 1%. I'm sometimes looking at them and 
thinking -
how can a man be so cruel, have no dreams, be so brainwashed, so jerk, how 
can ...
freenet.am/~sssite/man1.html

There were at least ten pages of Google results, of which these come from 
only just the first four.