Balderdash and Piffle

Sadly I’m not nearly as sexy as Victoria Coren but I have been asked by RDAL to find out a bit more about the origins of the word Punk and I thought that I would also throw in a bit about These Boots were made for Walking. On worrying that so many words in one comment box would probably cause it to explode I thought that this really merited a post of its own, so here goes.

Due to lack of time I have just done a quick internet trawl on this and I’m not sure how accurate all of the stuff you find on the internet is so I have merely reproduced what I have found. However if anyone else can come up with any other theories I would be most grateful to have them here.

To answer your question about Punk and the origins of the word RDAL I have come up with the following:-

The earliest meaning for punk is a 'prostitute or a whore'. Its origin is unknown but it first appeared in print in England in 1596, and soon was in very wide use. Shakespeare uses it four times, twice in Measure For Measure.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, punk was coming into use in the late 17th century meaning 'rotten, slow-burning wood, used as tinder'. The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology says that it may have been borrowed from the Algonquian word ponk which means, literally, 'living ashes'. The sense that the wood was rotten gained importance as punk began to be used widely. From there, the word took on the meanings of 'something worthless; foolish or empty talk'; 'an inexperienced youth'; and 'a hoodlum'.

The term punk rock was coined by rock critic Dave Marsh and first appeared in print in 1970 in the magazine Creem. He says this about it in an interview: "Our [Creem's] point of view was vulgar, belligerent, often less respectful to rock's major institutions...with the result that all of us--and especially me--were frequently assaulted with the epithet: 'You are such a punk'. I decided this insult would be better construed as a compliment...in order to emphasize our delight in rock's essential barbarism."

Another internet source states the following:-

The word "punk" first made an appearance in music journalism in a 1970 essay, "The Punk Muse: The True Story of Protopathic Spiff Including the Lowdown on the Trouble-Making Five-Percent of America's Youth" by Nick Tosches in Fusion. He described a music that was a "visionary expiation, a cry into the abyss of one's own mordant bullshit," its "poetry is puked, not plotted." That same year, Lester Bangs wrote a novella titled Drug Punk, influenced by William Burroughs' book, Junky, in which there is a line, "Fucking punks think it's a joke. They won't think it's so funny when they're doing five twenty-nine on the island." Dave Marsh used the phrase "punk rock" in his Looney Tunes column in the May 1971 issue of Creem, the same issue that introduced the term "heavy metal" as a genre name. Marsh wrote, "Culturally perverse from birth, I decided that this insult would be better constructed as a compliment, especially given the alternative to such punkist behavior, which I figured was acting like a dignified asshole." Tosches, Bangs, Marsh, Richard Meltzer, Greg Shaw and Lenny Kaye used the term to define a canon of proto-punk bands, including the Velvets, Stooges, MC5, the Modern Lovers and the New York Dolls (DeRogatis, Let It Blurt, 118-119).

And the final source states the following:-

'The word "punk" originally meant a prostitute, moldy wood or fungus. By [January 1976, when New York-based] Punk magazine took its name, it had gone on to mean a person who takes it up the ass in prison, a loser or a form of Sixties garage rock'n'roll' (John Robb, Punk Rock: An Oral History, London: Ebury Press, 2006, p. 150).

And now for something completely different.

On the subject of These Boots were made for walking, the correct title is "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'", a song composed by Lee Hazlewood and first recorded by Nancy Sinatra. It was released in February, 1966, and got to Number 1 in the United States and the United Kingdom Pop charts.

Nancy Sinatra was encouraged by Lee Hazlewood to sing the song as if she were a sixteen-year-old girl giving the brush-off to a forty-year-old man.

The song was adopted by troops in the Vietnam War when they marched, and Sinatra traveled there in the mid- to late-1960s to perform for the U.S. soldiers. It was used on the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987). Sinatra also sang it on an episode of China Beach in the late-1980s. In 2005, Paul Revere & the Raiders recorded a revamped version of the song using Sinatra's original vocal track. It appeared on the CD Ride to the Wall, Vol. 2, with proceeds going to help Vietnam veterans.

If anyone else can add anything to this I would be very grateful.

I hope this helps, RDAL. Please visit again for more words, although as to whether they are wise or not is a moot point which if you are interested comes from an Anglo-Saxon term for meeting. (Oh I will have to stop this now, I’m actually turning into Victoria Coren!!)