Bianca in San Diego, California, has heard family theories tying far out to surfers offshore, the Beach Boys, or 1960s psychedelia. The evidence points instead to jazz slang: by the 1920s, musicians and fans were using out of this world for music...
Gnarly, in surf talk, means a wave or wipeout that’s big, nasty, heavy, complicated, and maybe dangerous, the kind of challenge that can be bad news and, for a surfer, exactly the point of getting out in the water in the first place. Andrew from...
After Beyoncé Knowles sang “surfboard” in a lyric with a pronunciation fans heard as surfbort, the playful spelling took off online in 2014. It doesn’t really have a separate meaning. It’s a joking reference to that pronunciation, much as Beyoncé’s...
Martha reports that, during her recent attempt at learning to surf, she picked up lots of surfing lingo in between wipeouts. Such terms included tombstoning and pearling, both of which she did quite a bit. This is part of a complete episode...
Ahoy! We kicked off the new fall season of "A Way with Words" this weekend, asking, "How much humor and personality can you pack into a 140-character update? A lot, it seems. We discuss funny Twitter feeds, the origins of...
In this week’s slang quiz, a member of the National Puzzlers’ League from Somerville, Massachusetts, tries to guess the meaning of bottle room and shred, the latter as used in the context of snowboarding, skateboarding, and surfing. This...