Clutch and Dank

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eva Jo Gregory, and I’m from Billings, Montana.

Hey, Eva Jo, welcome.

How are you doing?

I’m doing pretty good.

What can we do for you?

My boyfriend is from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he uses these two phrases, which I really don’t understand.

One of them includes the word dank, and then the other one is clutch.

So I don’t know, if I make a really great meal or something, he’ll be like, oh, this is just so dank, this is so dank.

Or if he sees a really cool car or he loves motorcycles, a great motorcycle, he’d be like, that’s so clutch.

That’s so clutch?

That’s so clutch.

Is it just automobiles he says that about?

No.

Okay.

It’s almost as if he uses dank for, I don’t know, a particular object, and clutch is like a situation.

So if there’s something really cool going on, it’s clutch or there’s a cool car driving.

I can definitely help you with both of those.

Clutch is the easiest one, so I’ll just dispel with it quickly.

It probably comes from baseball where there’s a clutch situation, means that things are really tense and there’s a moment to score and the team really needs to do a good job in order to get ahead and beat their opponents.

And so that’s a clutch situation.

It probably comes from older expressions having to do with being in a clutch, which means being nervous or being tense.

And you do find clutch as an adjective throughout the sporting world, not just in baseball, to refer to these really serious situations where somebody’s got to, they’ve got to prevail, they’ve got to pull it all out and give 110% and win.

So if they do, it’s really cool.

It’s a really good, positive thing.

The situation is, yeah, it’s a good, positive thing.

So the clutch situation isn’t necessarily positive, but the positive outcome from the clutch can be positive.

So I could see why there’s a transference there and a kind of a slangy usage.

I would say that slangy usage isn’t that common, but dank that he uses to mean good or great or cool, that is incredibly common.

And most of our listeners are going, oh, yeah, that comes from the marijuana world.

But do you know how it comes from the marijuana world?

So dank has been used for at least 25 years to describe good marijuana.

And what’s funny about that is good marijuana isn’t necessarily actually dank, meaning moist or wet.

And it’s probably a sign that it’s not been, you know, it’s not ready to go.

Instead, I think it has more to do with the smell of good marijuana, which is kind of like, imagine a potato seller, which is going to be dank.

So any case, how dank became widely used in the marijuana world, I have a theory.

And it’s, I got this from Dr. John Leiter, who was the chief editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, which I used to help edit.

And in his notes, he has written that he believes it comes from a guy named Manny the Hippie, who appeared on the David Letterman show in 1996.

Manny the Hippie was this character in the Haight-Ashbury part of San Francisco in the mid-90s, clearly a drug user, an admitted drug user, a convicted drug user.

And David Letterman did a show on the road in San Francisco, and he ended up spending an entire day in a van with Manny.

Manny taking… And Manny is like… You can find some videos on YouTube of Manny the Hippie.

He’s a character.

But his vocabulary is loaded with things, including the word dank.

And as a matter of fact, it is the earliest use of dank that I know of.

I haven’t looked thoroughly.

But the fact is, in the mid-90s, the David Letterman show was huge.

We’re talking 20 years ago.

A lot of people watched that show.

And Manny was on the show multiple times.

And he was such a memorable character that Dr. Leiter’s theory, one which I endorse, is that Manny was responsible for popularizing the word dank in marijuana circles across the country.

Very interesting.

Yeah, well, I’m going to have to share with him what this really means because I don’t think he knows.

You don’t.

You think he just picked it up from friends then with no knowledge whatsoever.

He’s not a dope smoker?

Yeah.

No, he’s not.

Not a dope smoker, not a Letterman fan?

Well, that’s interesting.

So think about the generations.

He’s a Letterman fan, but definitely wasn’t watching 20 years ago.

Oh, okay.

Think about the generations, though, that now this word has come.

So it’s now used just to mean cool by a guy who’s not in the marijuana world.

That’s a natural progression for slang.

That’s pretty cool.

Yeah, it makes sense.

Very interesting.

All right, well, let us know what he says, will you?

I will, yeah.

All right, take care now.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Eva Jo.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Manny the Hippie also used the word schwag to mean bad.

Okay.

To mean bad, though.

Not to mean like excess stuff that you’re given for free or to me even to mean swagger or anything like that.

So that was one of his words, which it didn’t catch on.

Yeah, I’ve never heard it used that way.

Yeah, swag to mean bad.

I think there’s a few uses of it out there, but it’s not very common at all.

Manny the Hippie, I wonder why he wasn’t monetized.

I mean, he just sounds like a character, right?

Well, Manny apparently was in a really terrible movie and that was that.

Oh, okay.

He was in a movie.

You’ve got to watch this segment.

Go to YouTube, look up Manny the Hippie, just like you think it’s spelled.

Manny the Hippie and Letterman.

There’s like a five-minute interview after Manny has left prison, and the reason he was in prison, because he violated his parole by going to New York to be on the Letterman show and then was on the air talking about drugs.

And then he was imprisoned for 10 months.

Manny the Hippie is quite a character, let me tell you.

Three-time Darwin Award winner.

He’s still around, actually.

Just a few years ago, San Francisco Station looked him up, and he’s still in Haight-Ashbury.

A lot of people remember him from The Letterman Show.

All right.

So go to YouTube and watch Manny the Hippie, and as long as you’re there on your computer, send us an email with your questions and stories about language.

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