I think it’s cute how three different words – jinky, janky and junky – all have this venn diagram overlap that I like my work to be in the middle of. I might write an ebook someday titled “jinky janky junkyard” or something to that effect. I’ll start with this blogpost, and grow it from here.
Jink
Jinking is a concept in aviation. This maneuver is the sudden, rapid displacement of the aircraft’s flight path in three axes. This is used to confuse the enemy and prevent him from getting a good tracking solution, to avoid ground fire, or to avoid fragmentation patterns and ricochets.
In Scooby-Doo, Velma’s catchphrase is “Jinkies!” – it’s similar in meaning to “oh my” or “wow”, and “can be thought of as an expression of surprise”. This Linguaholic article suggests that it was a word used by university-educated nerds.
There’s a consistent element of surprise. “Hijinks” seems related here as well.
There’s an Irish/Scottish card game called Twenty-five, aka Spoilt Five, where there’s a move called Jinking.
This does explain why the etymonline page for “jink” suggests that it’s of Scottish origin, and I wonder if the aviation term is downstream of that.
There’s some bits from a 1989 William Safire article (nytimes.com), “On Language; High Jinks and Low Bogeys”. He writes,
Jink? This verb is identified as ”chiefly British” in Webster’s New World Dictionary and defined as ”to move swiftly or with sudden turns, as in dodging a pursuer.” As a noun, it refers to ”an eluding, as by a quick, sudden turn”; according to the usage by the American pilot facing the Libyan MIG-23’s, it also refers to sudden movements in an attack.
The intransitive verb jink is originally Scottish, and the Oxford English Dictionary speculates that it may be of onomatopoeic origin, ”expressing the idea of nimble motion.” Maybe it’s also connected to jig, which has a meaning of ”to move quickly,” as ”in jig time.” Since 1914, jink has been applied to a tricky or unexpected turn in rugby, akin to a ”dodge” in American football. It is also related to the last part of high jinks, or horseplay – and a warm hello to Jinx (short for Eugenia) Falkenburg McCrary, whose husband-and-wife radio interview program in the 1950’s began with ”Hi, Jinx.”
Huh, I hadn’t thought about Jinx.
Well, there’s more to get into there. According to Wikipedia, “A jinx (also jynx), in popular superstition and folklore, is a curse or the attribute of attracting bad or negative luck.”
Oh, and wryneck is a kind of bird. They have “cryptic plumage”, can turn their heads almost 180 degrees, and they are sometimes called “snake-birds” because they twist their necks and hiss when threatened. Apparently this bird is used in the casting of spells and divination, and… in ancient Greek mythology there was a sorceress named Iynx – a nymph, a daughter of Pan and Echo, who cast a spell on Zeus which made him fall in love with Io. And Hera punished her for this by transforming her into a wryneck bird.
And then somehow this term started getting used in baseball. Language is wild, I tell ya.
Jank
“Janky” can mean something untrustworthy or suspicious. There’s an origin in 90’s AAVE “janky-ass bitch”, and it also seems to have cropped up in nerdy contexts like card games (“janky deck“), computing (“janky code”, “janky hardware”), and other mechanical domains (“janky old boat”, “janky little tractor”). I find myself imagining something that’s sputtering and smoking, a janky engine.
There was a rock band from Philadelphia called Jank, stylized as JANK (or J A N K !), and they played… weed pop. “Emo-stoners”, “jubilant, grunge-y pop”, with song titles like “Grim Reefer” and “General Tso What?”
Here’s a patio11 thread on the jank in financial systems being a consequence of different people wanting different things
Junk
Of the three words, junk is the word that’s used the most, and has the most history, connotations, uses.
There are at least 4 different albums called Junk, and even Paul McCartney has a 1968 song called Junk. There are a couple of movies, an American one from 1920 and a Japanese Yakuza zombie film from 2000. There’s junk food, junk mail, junk bonds, a class of sailing vessel, slang for heroin as well as both dick (“he groped my junk”) and ass “she got a lotta junk in that trunk!”)
My favorite junk word is junkyard. I described Roam Research as a “magic junkyard“, and it’s a phrase that’s caught on with other people.
The Wikipedia page for Junkyard redirects to “Wrecking yard” as the master page. It’s interesting that that gets top billing, when the British word is “scrapyard” and the American is “junkyard”. The aircraft versions tend to be called “boneyard” or “graveyard” – the largest one in the world, the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group in Tucson, Arizona, is known as The Boneyard.
To be continued