Calvinism is Jank

When you get to be my age as a college professor you have to start acting like an anthropologist to keep up with the culture of your students. When I started teaching I could make a Seinfeld joke and everyone in the class would laugh. I was young enough that the students and I shared pop culture.

Those days are long gone. Both because I've aged and because I don't have the time I used to have to see movies, watch TV, be on Facebook, or listen to new music.

To remedy this situation I resort to anthropological fieldwork. I ask my students about what they are listening to, what's cool, what's lame. And so on. And I also pay attention how my students talk.

The other day I was visiting with Caren, our student worker in the department. She was talking about something and said, "It was pretty jank."

Jank?

"Did you say jank?" I asked. "J-a-n-k?"

"Yes," she replied. "Don't you know what jank means?"

I did not. So she spent some time explaining it to me. The anthropologist hard at work.

My researches into the meaning of jank continued this last weekend eating pizza with our friends Matt and Amy (Happy Birthday Amy!). Matt, being much more cool than I, helped fill in some details. I also spent some time looking up jank on Urban Dictionary.

As best I can tell, jank originally meant that something was of poor or lesser quality. But the meaning of jank has now evolved into an all purpose word for saying something is bad. Context largely defines the meaning of jank. If you don't like something or find something to be defective, cheap, or of poor quality you can call it jank. As in, "X is jank." (You can even say something is "janky".)

Given that this blog is on the cutting edge of theological experimentation (e.g., I've tried to introduce "D'oh" into the theological lexicon) I thought I'd try to introduce jank into the theological blogosphere.

Hence the title of this post.