“I’ll be stoked if I win gold.”
“I was totally stoked.”
“Stoked, man.”
You won’t believe how many times we’ve heard “stoked” since we started interviewing athletes for this crackerjack Olympic countdown 79 days ago. At least 79 times.
We’ve traced the origin of the word so that you’ll have a full appreciation for what it means when it’s dropped countless times during athlete interviews at the bottom of the halfpipe.
According to a handy etymology dictionary, the word “stoke” originated in the 1680s, meaning “to feed and stir up a fire in a fireplace or furnace.”
But that doesn’t mean a snowboarder is going to stir up the old fireplace if she wins gold.
By 1963, stoked was recorded in surfer slang as a synonym for excited, though the word in reference to people was earlier used to mean “to eat, to feed oneself up,” according to said dictionary.
And there you have it.