I think, but wouldn’t swear to it, that “dank” swam like a salmon upstream, against the usual flow of slang. We little white middle class suburbanites were using it by the late 80’s, for sure. It meant only the really *good *weed. Contrast with “ditch” or “Indiana” (probably a regionalism). My best friend’s last name was very close to “Dank”, and we’d tease her mercilessly about it. (She was also a pothead, so, y’know…if the shoe fits…) Snoop used it on Doggystyle, though, so it’s been in at least some black subcultures since the early 90’s.
I would guess, based on the way I’ve heard it used over the years, ‘ballin’ is a reference to drug dealing. When you ‘deal in weight’, then you aren’t one of the little street hustlers who sell dimebags on the corner…you sell eightballs…you ball out.
I realize that a basketball player is a ‘baller’ too, but I think generally speaking, the ‘balling’ term comes from the drug dealer scene. Speaking of the drug dealer scene, that is another case of slang taking forever to ‘go viral’. A drug dealer will call a hundred dollar bill a ‘ball’, and have done that for years (like a 20 is a dub and a 1000 is a stack and 10,000 is a rack and so on…)
But you won’t see ‘ball’ used like that much outside of the ‘trap’ or outside of where drug dealers do their thing. If you try to go to UD to look it up, it will either not be there, or will be there with a handfull of votes…because drug dealers aren’t the main ones putting definitions on Urban Dictionary. That is the beauty of slang, really. The more people try to get up on it, the more they are really pushed out of it.
I would say that anytime you see an acronym as an explanation for a slang term, (i.e., Phat = pretty hot and tempting), it’s almost certainly bullshit. If you were around in the 80s when graffiti artists tagged the word here or there, or hip hop artists put the lyrics in their album covers, you will see it was spelled ‘fat’. That PHAT stuff came later.
Well, ok, he is trying to be cute with the song, but the overall message is genuine and not ironic…he really is calling out those who spend to much for labels.
Yeah, this thread enlightened me. After talking to others about it, I realize how out of the loop I am. Many rappers have been using it on a regular, it seems. My ex rapped some Jay Z (you know I never liked Jay Z and I’m not a huge fan of Snoop either, outside a few hits by both of them) and Jay Z was definitely using ‘dank’ for weed. So I sharpened my slang on the dope…something I never thought I would say.
This is like when politicians cite Doom as an example of video game violence.
I used to hear swag used as stuff you got from a heist, burglary, etc. It usually imply theft of some kind. I assumed that morphed into meaning that taking all the shit they gave you at galas like that was the same as stealing it.
I’ve usually heard/read 1000 referred to as ‘large’ as in ‘yeah, I dropped 5 large at the casino last night.’
My fave name for pot I picked up in the UK - skunk. I still don’t really understand it but I guess a lot of people think that’s what it smells like. At the time hash was easier to get anyway, much trippier.
Skunk is a particular kind of weed, I think, which smells like skunk.
Man, don’t get me started on British slang. Cockney rhyming slang is just too far out of my grasp to ever master it, so I can only admire it from afar. Since I don’t foresee me being in the ghettos of England anytime soon, I will always just feel like a cornball on the outside, only getting the played out Hollywood version of the slang…never getting the real cutting edge version. Too bad for me. I refuse to even try to fake it for fun, because I know that anything I try will be some watered down old ass offshoot of the real deal. Sucks the fun out of it for me.
Love how kids these days are so aware of the essentially stochastic nature of the quantum mechanics which fundamentally drive the behavior of the observable universe.
“Skunk” is a descriptor for, yes, strong smelling weed. It’s not the name of a specific strain like Maui Wowie* and Blueberry Cough** are, but a reference to any of several varieties of weed with an odor of skunk. And yes, some weed does smell like skunk spray that you’re smelling from about half a mile from the skunk - the oddly good, non tear producing scent of skunk spray. Many potheads think that “skunkweed” or “skunky weed” is strong weed, but I don’t think there’s really a very strong correlation between skunk and strong. wikipedia maintains that skunk weed can vary from 6% THC (low, pretty much ditch weed) to 20% THC (Cancel your classes, order a pizza. And cheesy bread. Do they have wings?).
*one of the older named strains, I believe. Old hippies wax nostaligic about Maui Wowie. It’s not skunk; it’s got a sort of pine/citrus odor.
**Also not skunk weed. Yes, it smells like blueberries and yes, it makes you cough; Yay for descriptive titles on the dope! 