Gnarly means 'treacherous.' An acceptable synonym is 'hairy.' Surf punks use gnarly to refer to any wave over two feet or any woman of prodigious size. Long ago, words like 'gnarly,' 'rad,' and 'dweeb' moved inland, where they're now used by millions of channel-surfing couch potatoes.Ĭyber surfers, be aware: Cralle defines 'Ego surfing' as looking up your own name on the Web.Īs these waterborne words creep ashore, there's a danger that their original meaning will be lost. There are 25 pages alone devoted to words beginning s-u-r-f, including 'surflets' (emotions only those who take waves can understand). But the new edition is a 362-page tome, boasting more than 3,000 definitions. When the first Surfin'ary came out nine years ago, many folks assumed it was a mere glossary. Folks really began to catch the wave when the Beach Boys put on their baggies (swimsuits that sufficiently cover a man's bottom, the opposite of teeny-weenie Speedos) and everybody went Surfin' U.S.A. In popular culture, the myth of the tanned, blonde surfer goes back to the first Gidget movie in 1959. Irish-Hawaiian surfer George Freeth gets credit for introducing the sport to California in 1907. Captain James Cook observed surfing off the coast of Tahiti in 1777. 'Like any language, it's always evolving.'įolks have been climbing waves for well over 200 years. 'Surfing is a sensation that demands a special language to describe how it feels,' Cralle says. Surfers have at least as many terms for a wave - which can be 'macking,' 'double overhead,' or just 'buggery.' Indeed, there are many nuances that escape the landlubber who's never ridden a big one. The Eskimos might have a 100 different words for snow.

Surfer boy