A greenie is a large wave before it breaks. A tombstone is what a wiped-out surfer’s surfboard looks like, and getting rag dolled means getting shaken like, you guessed it, a rag doll by a powerful wave.Ī wave that might rag doll you is a very large one known as the pipeline, which also refers to the hollow part of such a wave. When a surfer is rubbished, she’s tipped off a wave, resulting in a wipeout, which, thanks to the Surfaris, most of us are familiar with. As for the name Quasimodo, that comes from a Latin Easter psalm, quasi modo geniti infantes, “as newborn babes,” referring to the hunchback’s being abandoned as an infant at Notre Dame on Easter Sunday.Įven for experts accidents are unavoidable. Perform a quasimodo and you’re hunched - like Victor Hugo’s hunchback of Notre Dame - at the front of your board with “head down, one arm forward and one arm back,” as per the OED. Performing superbly? You’re shredding.ĭo a misterioso and you’re bending over with your head hidden in your hands. Cheat with just one foot and you’re cheating five. Now how about those moves? Ride with all 10 toes over the nose of your board and you’re hanging ten. Kahuna comes from the Hawaiian word for shaman or wizard. If you’re a a woman who surfs, you might be referred to as a gurfer, a girl surfer, or a wahine, a Hawaiian term for a Polynesian woman as well as surf slang for a female surfer.Īnother Hawaiian surfing term is big kahuna, which originally referred to a prominent priest or sage in Hawaii, says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), and now means an expert surfer, a really big wave, or any bigwig. Surfing enthusiasts in general are surf-bums, surfies, and waxheads, referring to the wax used to make surfboards less slippery. Where the word comes from is unknown although one theory says it’s a contraction of hoodlum. And watch out if someone dubs you a quimby: they could mean a beginning surfer but they could also mean jerk or loser, especially if you’re guilty of snaking, or “stealing” a wave from a fellow surfer although he has the right of way.Īnother jerk-term is hodad, someone who comes to the beach with surf gear but never surfs. Grommet for instance, which might come from the Old French grommet, “boy, young man,” or jake, perhaps from a 19th century meaning, “rustic lout.” You might get branded a kook, a barney, or a gremlin. Or are you goofy-foot, right foot forward? Perhaps you can surf regular or goofy, in which case you’re a switch-foot.Īs a novice surfer, you might get called lots of names. Are you regular foot? That means your left foot is forward, like most right-handed surfers. (Turtles do indeed roll, specifically when they’re fighting or mating.) With a longboard, you’ll have to turtle roll, which involves rolling your board upside down as the wave gets close, then right side up once the wave passes.

With a shortboard, you can duck dive, or push your board nose-first underwater, like a duck diving for food. Now that you’ve got your surfboard, you’ll need to get past the breaking waves.

A whole collection of boards is a quiver. The fish is fish-shaped, the egg egg-shaped, and the gun is for “chasing big game,” ie big waves, and is also known as the rhino chaser or elephant gun. Nowadays, surfers use a variety of sizes, depending on their needs.Īccording to SurfScience, the longboard is the most traditional and good for beginners the shortboard “reinvented surfing in the 1970s” and the funboard is wider than but not as long as the longboard. In Hawaii back in the day, the length of your board echoed your status in the community: the longer your board, the more important you were.

Of course surfing is nothing without a surfboard (or surfbort, as Bey would say). The word surfing entered English more than 40 years later, in the mid-1950s. It was then, says HowStuffWorks, that surfing gained popularity with renowned boardsmen Duke Kahanamoku and George Freeth, often dubbed the “father of modern surfing” (and who passed away, sadly, at 35 during the 1918 flu pandemic). The verb to surf came about much later, around 1917. Originally used to describe the coast of India, surf may come from an Indian language, or else is a variant of sough, a soft, rustling noise. While the act of surfing got its start by Polynesian fishermen thousands of years ago, the word surf is from the 17th century. Since hitting the waves hit the mainstream in the early 1960s, surfing has spawned an entire culture - clothes, music, movies, and a bitchin’ lexicon.

Quiver meaning surf