The Truth About Twerk

This Newsletter Gets Down

Had there been sufficient demand for an Alphabest Juice, to follow my two word books, Alphabet Juice and Alphabetter Juice (or The Joy of Text), I would have dug into twerk.

            As you must be aware, the word describes a drastic dance move, which makes bump-and-grind look like tiptoe through the tulips. If I had been given the impression, during puberty, that screwing required anything approaching such athleticism, I might have considered regretfully taking holy orders. But in my day we had the twist. If Chubby Checker could do the twist (after appropriating it from Hank Ballard and The Midnighters), it was within most teenagers' aspirations.

            At any rate, where does the word come from.

            Now my go-to authority on the roots and evolution of words, which I recommend unreservedly, is etymonline.com. Here, however, etymonline is out of its depth:

            "So called from the motion involved." Well, yes.

            Etymonline goes on to say that the meaning "to dance in a way that simulates the body's action in copulation," was established "by 2005, alteration of twurk, which seems to have originated in the Atlanta, Georgia, strip club and hip-hop scene and first came to wide attention in the Ying Yang Twins' 2000 song 'Whistle While You Twurk,' described as ‘an ode to strippers. . .’”

            Okay. But why did that sound, that combination of letters, come to capture the motion?

            "Probably ultimately imitative of something." Well, again, yes. Prudence would have required etymonline to stop there, but no:           

"Related: Twerked; twerking. There is a verb twirk from 1599, 'to pull, tug, twirl,' what a man does with his mustache, but OED regards this as possibly a misprint of twirl."

            No. Call me way out of lane, but I cannot accept that twerk is at all related to a late-16th-century male mustache.

            Nor can I accept the Ying Yang twins' primacy. In a March 21, 2014 story in the New Orleans Times Picayune, reporter Doug MacCash told of a conversation he had with Cheeky Blakk (aka Angela Woods) of that city. Blakk had recorded in 1994 "a rap chant titled 'Twerk Something,' which most onlookers agree was the first use of the term in a title." Who these "onlookers" are, I don't know, but you can find the recording online.

     MacCash is driving Blakk home after a concert starring Miley Cyrus, who had brought the term, and a pale version of the move, to wide popularity. "As we tooled along Esplanade Avenue after the show," reports MacCash, "Blakk explained that she'd invented the term twerk as a substitute for the F-word, when describing especially suggestive dancing: 'I came up with the word because it used to be F-something. OK. My son was younger at the time.  It was way too explicit for me to do kids' parties yelling about F-something. So I turned it into twerk."

            MacCash notes that Cyrus's twerking "like her collection of tiny tattoos, seems a bit tentative by Crescent City standards," but Blakk is complimentary: "I look at it like: she has her own culture and her own style of dance. I mean it was really nice. I really enjoyed it. I mean, I don't have anything to be resentful of."

            MacCash also notes the irony that "Cyrus sprinkles the F-word as liberally as many of us sprinkle hot sauce on our gumbo."

            But to acknowledge Blakk’s coinership, we have to be satisfied that twerk is a euphemism. We have to imagine something like this pre-euphemism conversation:

            "Yo! What the fuck is she doing?"

            "Looks to me like she’s — ."

            “Sure looks like it. But it ain't just any fuck. And she’s doing it by herself. What shall we call it?"

            "Why not just 'the fuck.' You go girl! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"           

            No.

            Hollering "fuck" is what you do when you hit your thumb with a hammer. Furthermore, the rhythm is wrong. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" is slow, like Tennyson:

          Break, break, break

                      On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

          And I would that my tongue could utter

                      The thoughts that arise in me.

           I am happy to acknowledge Cheeky Blakk as a pioneer. Indeed it seems likely that twerking began on the New Orleans bounce-music scene, if only because bounce is so descriptive, up to a point, of the move, which we might describe, inadequately, as bouncing and wriggling at once. Pneumatic heavy-wriggling. But what were the first observers of the move likely to shout?

            Wriggle! Bounce!

            No. That's way off the beat. Words cannot express a simultaneous wriggle-and-bounce. And wriggle isn't quite right anyway. More like wrench. Only more fluid. How about:           

            Wring it out! Wring it out!

            A little better, but ... no. Here's what onlookers undoubtedly shouted, as urgers-on have shouted since time immemorial:

            Work it! Work it! Work it!

            The two words jammed together, to the booty's beat. By the third rep, the ih in it has retreated to the back of the mouth and you're going "twerk...twerk...twerk!"

And Here We Go Again With Our Universally Acclaimed Series of Limericks About No-Good Useless Men

The feet of a fellow named Lance

May sometimes get up and dance

            But not in rhythm.

            What he does with 'em

Is pretty much subject to chance.