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Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

> It’s likely ‘skank’ in the name is a variation of ‘skunkworks’ which was the team working on the device.

Right, sure it is.

Urban Dictionary is nowhere near the mark then, with widely accepted definitions of the slang term from circa 2004: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Skank

Edit: To be clear I read it as being "trashy", "tacky", "ugly". There are numerous definitions, I wouldn't have attributed (nor imagine anyone else attributing) the most unsavoury definitions to anything.

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When was that brief period in the 2000s where ska got really popular and "skanking" re-entered the public consciousness as a dance style? Because I could imagine that inside Apple people thought of the "silhouettes dancing with iPods" ads as "skankPod" ads. That would make "Skankphone" a pretty obvious nickname for a phone project.

The term had been current for a while: Rockafeller Skank by Fatboy Slim was 1998.

I always though that was an ironic title, seeing as Skank and Skanky have always had a pretty strongly negative connotation in the southern UK dialects. Fatboy being a Brighton resident at the time, and pretty trendy, I assumed it was along the same lines.

Or Red Dwarf's "Rastabilly Skank", 1988.

This is the comment I was going to make. This is an /extremely/ apologetic spin from Owen Williams, and seems very unlikely to be accurate.

Sorry. We took a stab in the dark on that one really - I've reworded it as it was an incorrect assumption and shouldn't have been there. Many think 'skank' refers to the unpolished quality of the unfinished device.

Here, let me help those under 40.

"That's one skanky UI. There's no way Apple is shipping that!"

Yeah, just substitute with nasty.

I doubt it has anything to do with skunkworks or prostitutes.

My first thought was Skank as a verb, which fits best with the idea of a handicapped/faux iphone.

it might be an ode to boings skunkworks witch designed a lot of their specialized planes, like the SR-71 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skunk_Works

Lockheed Martin, not Boeing.

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