I thought I’d check out Deadloch, an Aussie cop show that was reputed to be a well-done comic riff on deadly serious shows like Broadchurch (which my wife and I enjoyed a few years back), and sure enough it seems very enjoyable. But it uses some vocabulary I wasn’t familiar with; in the first few minutes someone mentions “all the nangs” in the vicinity of the crime scene, so of course I had to investigate. Wiktionary has it: nang (plural nangs) (Australia, New Zealand, slang) ‘A metal bulb filled with nitrous oxide gas, inhaled for its disassociative effects, normally intended as a propellant for whipped cream’ (Synonym: whippet). It seems to be quite new, since the OED doesn’t have it; there’s another nang, an adjective, which Wiktionary defines as (UK, slang, chiefly MLE) ‘excellent; awesome; masterful; deeply satisfying’ (“That was well nang!”) and says comes from “Jamaican Creole nyanga, potentially from West African languages, such as Mende (Sierra Leone) nyanga (‘ostentation; showing off’) or Hausa yanga (‘boastfulness’).” That one is in the OED (first published 2017):
British slang (chiefly London).
As a general term of approval: good, excellent, cool.
2002 Sometimes we use nang to mean good.
news.bbc.co.uk 18 January (Internet Archive Wayback Machine 21 Jan. 2002)2002 That’s nang dude.
abctales.com 6 March (forum post, accessed 3 May 2017)2004 The performance of ‘Rock Star’ with appearances by the Black Eyed Peas, Justin Timberlake, and E3’s finest Dizzee Rascal were nang.
Touch April 19/22016 I’m talking about a kid coming along and he’s nang. He was a very good yute.
‘Wiley’ in H. Collins, This is Grime 101
[…]
The etymology is simply “Origin unknown.” Which isn’t very nang.
So nang and naff are antonyms, more or less? Neato!
Hausa yanga “showing off” is real, but Hausa doesn’t strike me as a particularly likely source of London slang* or of a Jamaican creole word. And the y > n is difficult.
Mooré nánga “scorpion” has cognates not only all over Oti-Volta but all over “Gur”; sadly, I can concoct no way of making the etymon at all plausible as a source. Depends on how you feel about scorpions …
* Could be wrong: there are apparently enough Hausaphone schoolchildren in London that it’s worth recruiting Hausa-speaking teachers.
Wikipedia offers “whippet, nos or nang” as “colloquial” synonyms for what it more formally calls a “whipped cream charger.” I can’t claim previous familiarity with either nos or nang. I see wiktionary gives a sense of “nos” as either “Acronym of nitrous oxide system” or “Abbreviation of nitrous oxide.” It’s been some decades since whippets were (at least to my knowledge) a thing in circles I moved in, so I may not be au courant with the lingo, but the other two may even today not be AmEng.
Separately, I wondered about the antiquity of AmEng “whippet” and it looks like it was being used (capitalized) as a trademark for sale to those with legitimate need for cream-foaming technology no later than the 1940’s. There’s a 1978 Esquire article suggesting that both the item and that as a generic name for it had definitely made the transition to deprecated recreational use by then. I was certainly aware of that sense of the word no later than 1980, when Devo’s homophonously-titled number “Whip It” experienced chart success. (That’s not the double entendre most assumed the song was trying to evoke, but the homophony with the nitrous sense was I believe nonetheless remarked on at the time by tenth graders of my acquaintance.)
Green has nang adj. ‘first-rate, excellent’ derived from nyanga n. (also nang, nyang, yanga) ‘(West Indies) ostentation, esp. in one’s dress; a smart person; thus as adj., stylish.’, with citations as far back as 1902.
That looks very plausible. I think the question is really where Jamaican creole got it from (very unlikely to be Hausa.)
Perfectly possible that it didn’t come from any African language at all; but the Mende nyanga looks like a possible lead, at any rate.
But Akan or Gbe would probably be the best bets.
Kofi Yakpo’s Pichi grammar has (n)yangá “put on airs; coquet” and cites also Krio nyangá “be ostentatious.” Unfortunately he doesn’t hazard any guesses about its further origins, but he does specifically say that several other etyma shared by Pichi and Krio are from Mende.
Not sure that means a lot, though, given that he basically reckons that Pichi is mostly a Krio offshoot, and Krio has had plenty of opportunities to borrow from Mende since its (presumed) anabasis from the West Indies.
Still, this is evidently an echt pan-English-lexifier-Atlantic-creole word, and not just a Jamaicaism of some sort.
I don’t have any lexical materials for Mende, alas.
The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang by Tony Thorne (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), doubtless a thoroughly unreliable source, says (p. 302): “No one is quite sure of the origin of nang, which was first heard in East London at the turn of this century: it may be from a Bengali word for a naked woman, or from Nang Phan, the name of a Hackney school-girl.”
Yes. I think we can file that with … all the others.
Green gets my vote.
Hausa yanga seems to apply to women particularly, with an overtone of conduct unbecoming to a properly brung up Hausa young lady (which would probably commend it to the Youth of Today.) But I very much doubt whether Hausa has any more to do with it than nude Bengalis or this imaginary schoolgirl from Hackney. (Limerick?)
Can’t find anything remotely plausible in Akan. Don’t know any Gbe to speak of. But Mende looks like the top contender for the Ultimate Origin after all. It would be nice to have some other confirmation that Mende nyanga actually exists, though (and isn’t borrowed from Krio …)
Thorne’s source for the “Hackney school-girl” theory is presumably the August 11, 2003 contribution to urbandictionary.com by someone posting as “Nang’s Best Friend.” That adds the detail that Miss Phan (if that’s the surname) was specifically an alumna of “Kingsland Secondary School (now sadly gone).” Wikipedia says that that was a real school which was indeed in Hackney and was indeed shut down in 2003 at the behest of the “Office of The Schools Adjudicator,” which sounds like a rather frightening bureaucracy.
That sounds like the classic Urban Dictionary trope of using inside jokes and references to friends in fake definitions. Damn kids.
While I apologise to Miss Nang Phan for doubting her existence (unless she is, in fact, non-existent, in which case I don’t care about her at all*), even if she is real, this screams “folk etymology.”
“Peng” is another Londonese term of approbation for one’s person, one that I was actually aware of despite my own extremely low level of hip-and-happeningness. I’ve no idea where that comes from, either.
* Rank existentialism, on reflection. I repent. Nonexistent people are people too.