Gank, To Steal

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Mark. I’m calling from Los Angeles.

Well, hello, Mark. What can we do for you?

Well, I encountered kind of a word that I thought was everywhere, and I’ve recently found out it’s not.

And the word is gank.

I used it, you know, it means to steal, I believe, or how I use it.

And I used it around some work friends, and nobody knew what I was talking about.

And in fact, one person thought I was talking about something having to do with video games.

So I wanted to know what’s the deal with that word and why don’t these people know what’s going on.

What were you doing when you ganked something?

I don’t remember exactly at that time, but I’ve certainly been known to gank fries at a diner.

You know, that’s something that I would do.

So you snagged somebody else’s fries without asking?

Yeah, I didn’t want to order them myself, but I still wanted to eat them, so I just kind of took them.

Okay.

Oh, I have to confess, I didn’t know the word either.

Well, I have it in one of my dictionaries that I made.

Oh, I must not have gotten to that page.

You didn’t make it to G?

I started from Z.

Come now.

Yeah, I have an entry for that in the official dictionary of unofficial English.

The other question I have for you, I guess, besides what were you doing, is where do you think you learned it?

It’s hard to say.

I mean, I grew up in the Northeast, in New Jersey, outside of Philadelphia.

And then it just sonically sounds like some of the other Philadelphia words like John and things.

So I wondered at that point that maybe if it was a Philly regional.

Then I started asking Philly friends, and they didn’t know what I was talking about either.

Do you listen to a lot of hip-hop?

I do know some, but I’m certainly—it’s passing knowledge.

I’m certainly not in the community.

Okay.

Because the word is strongly associated with African-American Black English, vernacular English, Black English.

It shows up in hip-hop as early as 1987 in an NWA song.

So gank is a verb meaning to steal.

It’s got at least 30 years of history, probably more.

The entries I did for it took it back to the 90s.

There’s another gank that I think is related.

It’s where you have fake drugs that you pass off as real drugs,

And the drugs themselves that are fake are called gank.

So it’s all about the idea of being deceived here.

It pops up again and again.

You can find it in a ton of black fiction as well.

But again, hip-hop lyrics are a real strong source of this.

I would suspect that this is where most people learn the word if they weren’t one of the people who used the word in the first place.

Sure. So with that, I mean, if that was NWA, was that probably Los Angeles area?

Maybe?

Probably was the Los Angeles area. Yeah.

You never know, though, because it was widespread.

It’s been widespread throughout its history.

One note to make here is the slang lexicographer Jonathan Green and his vast and highly recommendable Green’s Dictionary of Slang

Suggest that gank with a G, G-A-N-K, is related to jank, J-A-N-K.

I don’t think I buy that, but it is hard with slang to really know what’s connected.

And the other thing I’m hearing is, for some reason in my mind, ganking someone’s fries is kind of associated with this interjection that I’ve heard people use.

They go, yoink, when they take something that isn’t theirs.

Sometimes they do it as a playful act to kind of keep away, but sometimes they do it because they want it.

In any case, that’s the most that I know.

But again, a 30-year history is a long history for a slang word to stick around and keep being used.

Mark, call us again sometime.

Absolutely.

Thank you, guys.

Have a great day.

Take care. Bye-bye.

What’s the slang that you’ve been hearing that you just can’t figure out?

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