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Can someone explain how the saying 'All out of whack' came about? There certainly are numerous uses for this word, but it's funny this one came about. Americans use it to mean off-balance, or off-kilter, I think.
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Oh boy, I get to unearth my very first edition of Capricious Piffle. Well, I believe it dates back to Sumerian times, when artisans kept their carts well oiled with an amalgam of ground up wheat, pig lard, river muck. The name "whack" came about from combining the "wh" of wheat, the "a" of lard and the "ck" of muck, thus the wheels of their carts were kept running with a healthy application of "whack". This was a rather runny concoction, so after a few days they would have to re-apply the "whack". Most well-run businesses would keep a bucket or two of back-up whack with them, but these supplies could soon be used up, and they would be "out of whack".
Today's capricious piffle is brought to you by the letter "N" and the number "5".this thread can be found at http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=4512
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Carpal Tunnel
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I don't know if this came up the first time around (I'm old, you know), but there was an earlier sense of whack in US of "A bargain or agreement. Esp. in phr. it's (or that's) a whack."
1876 ‘Mark Twain’ Tom Sawyer vi. 70 I'll stay if you will.’ ‘Good—that's a whack’.
...so it's not too great a stretch to think that "out of whack" at first was used for "out of agreement".
but here's the first citation: 1885 C. A. Siringo Texas Cowboy v. 33, I was too weak to walk that far on account of my back being out of whack.
[all citations OED]
{apologies to jazz}
-jimmy (whacko) locke
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Thanks for your prompt answer Jazz. We avoid discussing the other AE uses of whack as a verb then hey. Cheers once again.
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journeyman
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Out of Whack, Out of kilter, my 17 yr old son, who is excellent with getting things that are out of whack to work, said that perhaps it means this. When something is not working, if you give it a whack (hit) it usually starts to work again. Hey, he is not great with words but perhaps he "hit the nail on the head" with this one.
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My teenage kids in bi-lingual Anglo-Welsh schooling have recently brought home the expression <kifted>, which seems to be used in analagous ways to "out of kilter". A typical sentence might be "The post on the machine's all kifted", meaning something like bent, deformed...
Anyone come across this or anything like it?
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Semi-relative to the jive thread somewhere else, I had an employee who used "funk-whacked" and "jimmy-ratted" to mean the same as "out of kilter, whack, etc" or the recently revealed "kifted". Fine phrases to wish well as they make their way through the global consciousness and straight into OED, baby. 
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enthusiast
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In reply to:
My teenage kids in bi-lingual Anglo-Welsh schooling have recently brought home the expression <kifted>, which seems to be used in analagous ways to "out of kilter". A typical sentence might be "The post on the machine's all kifted", meaning something like bent, deformed...
Anyone come across this or anything like it?
Yeah, a friend's son came home from school with the announcement: "My teacher says I'm a gifted kid."
His dad replied: "Are you sure he didn't say 'kifted git'?"
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Carpal Tunnel
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"git"--
That's the second time I've seen that recently. What is that, please, and how did it come into use? It sounds like
it might be a corruption of "got", short for begotten, here meaning ill-begotten. I have a vague idea that a long time ago, 'get' was a term for one's offspring, but am not aware of any negative connotation associated with it.
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enthusiast
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"git"--That's the second time I've seen that recently. What is that, please, and how did it come into use? Sorry, can't help you much, Jackie, even though it was my post, other than to explain that I regard it as a synonym of "idiot". It's not a word I use or hear much around here. My brain wants to prefix it with the adjective "daft" - it has a British TV comedy ring to it, I think. I had cause to think of the word again today when reading Anu's AWADmail Issue 25 in which Bradley Perkins was quoted as writing: 'The reason I noticed it is that my mother has a peculiar habit, which she passed on to me, of alphabetizing the letters of words that she reads, as just a "mental fidget" ("aelmnt defgit").' I couldn't work out whether the reference in the one sentence to his mother and something I would pronounce as "ailment deaf git" was deliberate or not.
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