Donk, Box & Bubble

[Benjamin Zimmer]

>From the NYT Magazine's "Consumed" column...


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17wwln-consumed-t.html
[...]
Picture, for instance, a 1976 Impala improbably perched on 26-inch
wheels and painted in colors inspired by a variety of Hawaiian Punch.
This is what's called a donk.
The donk is a car-customization mash-up, forcing a reconciliation
between seemingly contradictory trends. First: the well-established
low-rider idea of modifying the suspension on, say, a carefully
restored Impala, so that it rides as close to the ground as possible.
The second trend is rim inflation, the more recent but evidently
unflagging popularity of increasingly large wheels, especially on
S.U.V.'s, associated with the blingiest manifestations of hip-hop
style. It was apparently in Miami, about six years ago, that somebody
decided to marry these notions and modify a classic low-rider car to
accommodate oversize rims, according to Brian Scotto, who is the
editor of a magazine called Donk, Box & Bubble.
Technically, Scotto explains, donks are Caprices or Impalas from the
years 1971 to 1976. (One theory about the provenance of the name
"donk" is the resemblance of the Impala logo to a donkey; another is
that it derives from a slang term for a shapely posterior.) A
similarly customized Caprice or Impala from model years 1977 to 1990
is a box, and '91s through '96s are bubbles, names that reference the
cars' silhouettes. Scotto's magazine uses the term hi-risers to cover
the entire category, but most any tricked-out boxy '70s sedan is now
routinely called a donk. The key is "really big wheels, wheels that
obviously do not fit in the wheel well," Scotto continues, adding that
these days, you really need 24-inch wheels to qualify.
[...]


--Ben Zimmer

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