Today’s Zippy is adrift in snow and youth sports slang:
I won’t try to gloss all the slang and sport-specific terms in the last two panels, but instead focus on just one, huckfest, a term used for demonstrations (often in competitions) of daring and skill, especially in stunts and tricks involving going airborne or going over a drop-off. In the world of snow sports, it’s applied to skiing, snowboarding, and snowcatting/snowmobiling, but it’s also applied to sandboarding, skateboarding, mountain biking, kayaking, and similar events with trucks (in the sand) and remote-controlled airplanes.
There’s even the magazine Huck, “a bi-monthly lifestyle magazine rooted in surf, skate and snowboarding”, published in English, German, and French, and distributed internationally. (Note the nice “reduced coordination” in surf, skate and sandboarding, going “inside” compounds.) And a Go Huck Yourself website, which provides a gloss:
Huck (hŭk): verb. To throw, to toss; in cycling, kayaking, snowboarding, and similar sports, to ride over a drop-off. See also: sending it, try it with more speed.
(Urban Dictionary has related definitions, but with less precision.) It’s easy to find lots of occurrences of huck used as a euphemistic replacement for fuck, and the name of the blog (suggesting go fuck yourself) and the term huckfest (suggesting fuckfest) point to fuck as the origin of huck. Perhaps related to the idiom fuck around, though huckers are in fact quite serious about their play.
Hucking seems to be very heavily an activity for dudes — and except for the truck events and the remote-controlled airplane events, mostly dudes in their teens. So the racy associations of huck fit right into this social world.
January 9, 2011 at 6:40 pm |
“A schwank recovery from an almost deadly Dook Blast” is given as the definition of “tootloop” at the Snowboarding Dictionary, an Urban Dictionary-like site (in that it relies on fan contributions). Every one of Zippy’s other slang terms is also defined or used on that site, so I suspect Griffith used it as his source.
Snowboarding Dictionary defines “huckfest” as “A gathering of snowboarders riding as hard and wild as possible”, and “hucker” as “One who throws himself/herself wildly through the air and does not land on his/her feet”. “Huck” itself has no definition.
So I guess the point here is that a major snowstorm evokes free-association in both characters, but where Griffy waxes poetic, Zippy gets playful. I seldom “get” Zippy to this degree.
January 10, 2011 at 10:58 am |
[…] my previous posting on the verb huck and the compound noun huckfest, I noted their use in a variety of sport and stunt […]
January 17, 2011 at 11:01 am |
[…] By arnold zwicky Continuing my earlier postings on huckfests and hucking (here and here): some words about the compound noun huckfest and the related fuckfest, mentioned in the […]
January 31, 2020 at 8:24 am |
[…] “I love skating in the Vans Era,” she explains. “I don’t do a lot of hucking, I’m more of a technical skater, so [they help me] feel my […]