Hacked off?

[ACW599]

On a similar topic, where does 'hacked' in the sense of either 'hacked off' or 'hacking it' come from? It seems to have made its way into more common use over the years, but in the 1970s it seemed to be specific to the RAF.

John

[BEagle]

It comes from a term used in 'Uckers' - a board game loosley based on Ludo played in crewrooms back in the days when it was OK to relax and absorb wise counsel from one's elders when not flying...

Which the Rental Air Farce can't afford these days..:*

Rack it, track it, hack it.. F*ck it, missed it!

[Zoom]

Has a couple of other meanings, of course: to start your stopwatch, and to attack. I was doing a bounce sortie against a Harrier 4-ship many moons ago and, since the radar was u/s, I asked the Harrier leader 'Can I have a hack at the ridge?' to help the interceptions. Nothing happened for the rest of the afternoon, as I waited for his 'time' hack at the ridge and he waited for my 'attack hack' at the ridge. We were all hacked off 'cos we didn't hack it.

[Spur Lash]

There's more!

Achieve the standard required: "You can hack it!"

To rebrief an errant: "Hack him in the forks."

But most probably has its origins in the process of rope-making, where natural fibres are combed into straight lines by hackle-boards, which were/are blocks of wood or metal, studded with steel prongs. Hacking.

BTW. I reckon 'Mark' is so much more civilised than 'Hack' for a time check!:ok:

[Eagle 270]

On the time check side of life, I believe 'hack' comes from those chinless cav types who choose to wear yellow cords and pink shirts. You know the sorts, the ones who are usually married to their sister. I could be wrong of course...

[TheNightOwl]

Gotta go with BEagle here, I'll believe anything originated from the most wonderful game "Uckers"! Not too sure about the "absorbing wise consel from one's elders", though, perhaps severe abuse and physical maiming might be more accurate, especially in the crew-rooms I used.

BEagle - I was told we (RAF) nicked the game from the Navy, can you confirm or deny? Wherever it originated, I miss playing it, no-one outside the RAF seems to have heard of it, certainly not in these parts!

Kind regards,

TheNightOwl.:ok:

[Bof]

Follow up to Beagle's comments. definitely nicked from the Navy. At one time they even used to play with the board marked out on a parade ground - using bods as pieces and having two jolly jacks rolling a giant pair of dice in a barrel.
As for advice from your wiser elders, at Lyneham in Comet 2 and Hastings days it was accepted that the players were merely there to move the pieces. The game was "actually" played by the crowd of kabbitzers standing around shouting advice!
If it wasn't uckers, it was kirkee. There was the occasion when the Boss of 99 came into the crew room to get someone to carry out a chore. Huge crowd round the uckers table and just one poor sod doing something useful like amending an AP in a corner. No way would the boss upset the uckers players - the poor guy amending his service book got the chore!

[The Rocket]

Ah yes,

Blobs and Throbs, that brings a few memories back!!

[Eagle 270]

Suck back, mixy blob and blow 4, always a contentious bunch of rules! A good station would have its ucker SOPs lined up next to 'pilots to see and Station standing orders'.

I seem to remember that ex 96 and 97 on the auth sheet was 'Uckers solo and pairs' (98 and 99 always being wazzing and zooming!).

Twas always a matlot inheritance as I understand it. First played the game in Khormaksar in '66 whilst hosting some strange chaps from Sheba (why do the fishies insist in calling a bit of land a 'ship'?)

[grusome]

Certainly from Uckers, which was introduced to the RAAF by the RAN at least before 1967-68. The only crew-room activity allowed when I was instructing at RAAF Pearce (WA) in those years.
I suspect the Navy tradition goes way back.
Gru

[BEagle]

'Uckers' was definitely one of the traditions the RAF inherited from the Senior Service!







We let them keep rum, bum and the cat o' nine tails though - fortunately!

The last time I recall playing Uckers was during a ME refresher course at Arthur Scargill International when the Wg Cdr on the course and I decided to take on a team from the AFTS students. It went on for most of the morning - until the miserable old farts who instructed on the Wetdream moaned about "Students wasting their time playing games when they should be working". The Wg Cdr (excellent bloke!) gave them a sound debrief concerning the value Uckers played in the real Air Force for team building. But agreed that we'd played enough that day.

I hated every minute in the god-forsaken Wetdream!

[JessTheDog]

Wasn't it from a Victorian war, when amputees were less than pleased with their situation? ;)

[Pontius Navigator]

I believe an uckers game could last about 30-40 minutes what with the pairs and so on on 50 BUT

On 12 some smart chap created a FIVE-MAN board just for a 5-man V-Force crew. Now a 5 man board was something else. The game used to run for 2.5 - 3 hours with blobs and super-blobs and alliances.

[Eagle 270]

PN, brilliant!! A fiver uckers board!

Can you imagine the size of board and length of game if 8 or 23 decided to do a 'crew' uckers board????

[FatBaldChief]

Anybody for a Flying suckback? Or even a Running Blowback? Or even a Sprinting Throbback?
Uckers or Pat Pong you decide!!

Bald and round as an Ucker :8

[Eagle 270]

Some links...

http://www.gunplot.net/uckers/uckers1.html

http://www.hms-yarmouth.com/uckers.htm

http://www.biscuitsbrown.com/uckers/uckers.php

[BEagle]

Strange - just naval variants of ludo!

Real Uckers is more tactical - and involves scoring the hacks achieved. The game finishes when the first team get home, but the winning team is the one with the higher hack score. This adds an extra dimension; if you are behind in hacks and in danger of getting home, a sacrificial self-hack may be advantageous to go back to the start, then syph out and hack the opposition. Spotting this ploy, they may not be keen to leave one uck lurking whilst diddlying-dumming another....

All mystery to yoof of today, I guess. Who probably go to a 'gym' (whatever that is) rather than practise team building and tactical mental development playing uckers in the smoky corner of a crewroom over a mug or three of 'standard NATO'.

[buoy15]

I sadly witnessed the demise of uckers at ISK in the the late 80's when the new Sqn boss of No 1 RNAS - who remains nameless, less I get fined a bottle of port - came into the crewroom and said,
"If you lot have enough time to play uckers, you must all be 'B' cats".
We were so incensed, we wanted to throb on his knob, bloat him, and bash his base, so we asked hin to make the next throw - Guess what? - he threw a tricky die of two 6's.
He's now a 1 star

Love many - Trust a few - Always paddle your own canoe

[ACW599]

>Just like OC 50 used to do - often escaped from his office to thrash the JPs at Uckers! You could sound out the boss for latest news & he could keep abreast of gossip at t'coalface.<

That just has to be Chris Lumb. Used to thrash the studes in my UWAS days -- was there ever a better uckers player?

John

[BEagle]

Mortuus quam mortissime!

[ACW599]

>I think he had sold his soul to the devil the way the dice rolled for him!! Happy days!<

Yes. That would also explain why he could perform uncannily perfect barrel rolls and slow rolls either way in the Chipmunk, was a first-class golfer and seemed to have an infinite capacity for beer. A lovely man, fondly remembered by UWAS lads and gaps.

John

[November4]

From the Etymology Dictionary (http://www.etymonline.com)

c.1700, originally, "person hired to do routine work," short for hackney "an ordinary horse" (c.1300), probably from place name Hackney (Middlesex), from O.E. Hacan ieg "Haca's Isle" (or possibly "Hook Island"). Now well within London, it was once pastoral.

[Blacksheep]

30-40 minutes Pontius? You obviously played with rank amateurs. The finals of the 1968 Inter-Service match in Singapore between RAF Changi and HMS Terror began at Changi Engineering Wing at 1500, proceeded to The Europe Bar and concluded at the coffee shop of the Malaysia Hotel at 0600 - a total of 15 hours play excluding the walk down the village and the taxi-ride to Tanglin Circus. RAF Changi won after a stupendous "Suck Back Five" by the Changi team captain, Corporal MicK Jackson of Electrical Engineering Squadron. No Army teams made it into the final stages - they couldn't Hack It obviously and the championship was a purely RN/RAF grudge match. Tiger Breweries allegedly made an extra S$150,000 during that week, just from the spectators.

Hacking has nothing to do with Hackney cabs, hacking jackets or early military amputations. Hacking is not only what Uckers players do, but is derived from the method of procuring the pieces from military issue broom handles.

[adr]

The Cassell Dictionary of Slang throws some light on hack (with twelve meanings for "hack" before the derived phrases!).

"Hacked off," they say, comes from the C19th slang verb "hack", to annoy. By the 1930s "hacked off" meant very angry. Between the late C19th and 1910s, "hacked off" in American slang usage meant exhausted.

"Hack it," they say, comes from the sense of the standard verb "hack," to cut through, via a slang use of "hack" from the 1910s, to accomplish something. They date the phrase "hack it" as "C20th".

adr

[BEagle]

Our ULAS Uckers set circa 1970 did indeed use offcuts from a standard military broom handle for the ucks! They had then been dipped into the chippy's paint before being allowed to grace the IPS!

Our games lasted most of the day on Black Flag days - and even on flying days, players would spell for eachother when chosen to go and commit aviation!

"Fever four? Shall diddly-dum* and lurk!"

*Means to leave one uck alone and take both dice scores with the other - but the higher score had to be taken first - i.e. the 5 before the 4 even if that caused a self-hack (back to home and 2 hacks to the oppostion). "Diddly-dum" was the noise made by fast trains of the period; thus one uck moved forward by nine and the other stayed put - lurking just before the opponent's donk was a valuable tactic as a hack on the donk counted double.

Sorry - you had to have been there - it's sadly a bygone age!

[Navaleye]

Hmnn... 'Uckers... Got agree with BEagle that its a Navy game invented to be played on empty powder barrels, but probably most widely played by light blue. On a run ashore we used to go into local establishments and "bet" on it with big "winnings" piling up for one player or another. This usually resulted in a crowd of locals watching having no idea whatever of what they were looking at. A grateful bar manager would more often than not give us free booze if we promised to come back tomorrow. It didn't work in Malta though. :uhoh:

[teeteringhead]

Ah .......... the broomstick offcuts!! A truly Proustian "madeleine moment".

I recall once when I was an irresponsible cheating Plt Off slipping a couple of extra men of the opponent's colour onto the board ... and he didn't notice until he realised he had nowhere to put the 9th hacked man ..... he can't have been that dull though - he retired as a 2-star!

[maxburner]

Every fast jet squadron and every Q shed had an Uckers board. Given the 'reduced orbat' these days, I wonder where the boards went?

[ACW599]

>"Hacked off," they say, comes from the C19th slang verb "hack", to annoy...<...SNIP...>.... They date the phrase "hack it" to "C20th"<

That's very interesting and seems to clinch the answer to the original question. Many thanks.

As for uckers, UWAS studes were simply the best. Who are ULAS anyway? Who won the Drooper Trophy most years <g> ?

John

[foldingwings]

Strike QRA Laarbruch 1970s

Uckers school would start 5 mins after Takeover complete and end upon departure 24 hours later if it was a really hard school. Only one thing could stop it - the hooter - but even then some had to be dragged to their jet!

Yep the Navy gave it to us!

Syph on yer Donk, mate!