Danny from Tallahassee, Florida, works out four or five days a week and wonders about the slang he hears at the gym. Jacked, meaning muscular or pumped up, may be tied to senses of jack meaning to lift, raise, or increase, as with a car jack. Another possible influence is drug slang, where jack can mean to inject. Other gym terms include January joiners, the New Year’s-resolution crowd that often disappears by month’s end, and cardio queens, a dismissive label for women who stroll on treadmills while reading magazines. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Gym Slang, Including “Jacked,” “January Joiners,” and “Cardio Queens””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, how you doing? My name is Danny. Calling from Tallahassee, Florida.
Welcome, Danny. What’s up?
How you doing?
Well, I guess I was calling about some of the terminology you hear at a gym. I’m wondering if, you know, there’s a few terms that I don’t know where they come from, even though they’re super simple.
Well, give us an example. You spend a lot of time in gyms, I guess?
Oh yeah, work out like maybe four or five days a week.
Okay, all right.
Wow, all buffing stuff.
Like, you know, the one term, it’s the simplest one. Everyone says, but jacked. I have no idea where it comes from.
You know, I worked on a definition for that exact term a couple of years ago when I was putting together a collection of meanings of the word jack that weren’t in mainstream dictionaries. And that was one of them.
My conclusion at the time is that this jacked had two possible associations. One was there’s a lot of meanings of jack which have to do with lift or to raise or to increase or to make something higher.
Sure, like with a car.
Exactly, like a mechanical jack. And so it might have something to do like that. And if you think about the motion of lifting weights, you can think about this kind of repetitive up and down motion that kind of is similar to the jack that you might lift a car with.
Yeah, or getting pumped.
Getting pumped, yeah. Feeling the pump.
And then the other one is, and this one is a little less, I’m a little less sure about this, but there’s a possibility this contributed as well. There is a culture of steroid and drug use and part of the bodybuilding community, right? And when you put a needle into your arm, you are jacking a drug into your body.
And this is kind of related to like jacking in to be online or putting a phone jack, right? So it’s actually inserting something into a place that is intended to go. And so that’s my impression is that if you’re jacked, it means like you are elevated, hyped, raised up, that you’re physically or emotionally or in some other way kind of lifted to a new level.
Does that sound familiar, Danny?
Oh, yeah, that does sound, I guess, kind of familiar. I was thinking about like a car jack, you know, but wasn’t sure if it made sense. I didn’t think about the drug use.
So what else is going on in the gym? What other kind of language do they use?
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of slang terms. Like, let me think here, January joiners. Everyone knows what those are.
Oh, January joiners.
Sure, they’ve got the new motivation.
Yeah, she’s on Mad Men. She’s got the new motivation, right? And they show up the first week and maybe the second, but not the third are on.
Yeah, all the people that make New Year’s resolutions. And then by the end of January, they’re usually gone.
That’s good.
January joiner. I haven’t heard that.
Cardio queen, I guess.
What’s a cardio queen?
It’s those girls. They show up with kind of a decent amount of makeup on, and then they just kind of walk on the treadmill, and that’s really all they do. They just walk and, like, read a magazine, so they never lose any weight or anything.
Nice.
But their makeup is perfect.
Love it.
Well, these are great terms. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to find some of these more reputable glossaries online, and we’ll share them with the rest of the audience. This is good stuff, Danny. I really appreciate it. Thanks for educating us. Take care.
Oh, thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye, Danny.
New slang, Grant?
Yeah, it’s tons of great stuff, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that’s what happens. We’ve talked about this before, but you get a bunch of people in one place, occupied in the same enterprise, and they feel a little different from the outside world. They develop their own language, their own shorthand.
Yeah, great stuff.
Cool stuff.
Call us.
