Click here to get this free weekly newsletter delivered to your e-mailbox! Want to see more? Go back to All the Words main page.

Slang of the Week: skank (noun)
a low-class, sometimes ugly and often promiscuous woman
 
Example:
Jennifer was feeling sexy in her tube top and daisy dukes until a passing driver shouted “Skank!” out the window.

Celebrity quote:
“Despite Christina Aguilera’s claim in the new song 'Still Dirty' that she’s 'still got the nasty' in her, it would be fair to say that the girl in the assless chaps has undergone a serious de-skankification since her 2002 album Stripped.”
-Music critic Jenny Eliscu in Rolling Stone

So why did Eliscu think Aguilera was a skank on her previous album? It might have something to do with those pants that showed her buttocks in the video for Dirrty, a song that contained the lyrics:

Tight hip huggers (low for sure)
Shake a little somethin' (on the floor)
I need that, uh, to get me off
Sweat until my clothes come off

Well, that and the fact that she appears on the CD cover dancing topless. In the video for her new single “Ain’t No Other Man,” Aguilera appears as the retro character “Baby Jane,” dancing in 1930s underwear (apparently not a reference to the creepy 1962 movie Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) But presumably she’s not a skank anymore because the song is about her devotion to her new husband, Jordan Bratman.

And speaking of dancing, skanking is also a (somewhat strange) kind of dance done to Ska music. How do you do it? Take a look!