slappy

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Walt Whitman notably used slappy in his 1855 Leaves of Grass to describe the sound of water on “the slappy shore.” This slappy is based on slap, an onomatopoeic word dating back to the mid-1400s. In the 1930s, slappy was a slang variant of slap-happy, a slightly older colloquialism for “punch-drunk” or “carefree.”

As a character name in fiction, Slappy appeared in 1959 in the children’s book Slappy: The Story of a Little Duck, about a duckling whose webbed feet made a “slip-slap” sound when he walked. In 1993, Goosebumps horror series author R.L. Stine introduced the more familiar fictional Slappy, an evil, gray-suited ventriloquist dummy with creepy red lips and matching bowtie, in his book Night of the Living Dummy.

Carved out of coffin wood by a sorcerer, Slappy comes to life with the utterance of magic words written on a card in his pocket. Across the Goosebumps franchise, Slappy is resurrected by a variety of young characters, who often first encounter him discarded in the trash only to fall under his spell. True to his name, Slappy is known for his open-handed smacks (slaps) and horrible insults (a take on slapstick humor).

Slappy became a huge hit with Goosebumps fans, and subsequently appeared in various Goosebumps books, television shows, and video games from the mid-1990s into the 2010s. Slappy came back to life yet again in 2015 with his silver-screen debut as the main antagonist in the film Goosebumps, in which the dummy is voiced by actor Jack Black. Stine released Goosebumps: SlappyWorld in 2017, which focuses entirely on Slappy’s character. His appearance in the 2017 mobile-app game Goosebumps HorrorTown proves Slappy is a hard character to kill off.

Unrelated to young-adult horror, the term slappy also describes a classic skateboarding move invented by skater John Lucero in the 1980s. The move is a grind (sliding on an object like a curb or railing) achieved by approaching a curb at a high speed, as opposed to a jump, as if the board is slapping it. The slappy has become a core move in skateboarding.

Slappy is also an American football slang term, apparently a shortening of slapdick (“uniformed newbie,” the slang alluding to a flaccid penis), used in the NFL since the 1990s to refer to an unsuccessful, minor, or unimportant player. In an NFL TV documentary series, Detroit Lions coach Jim Schwartz described his work as a young slappy, or errand boy, for the Cleveland Browns from 1993–95. The football slappy has been credited to former Ravens coach Brian Billick, said to use slapdick for “anyone who is anything less than brilliant at his or her job.” Billick himself has said he picked up the term from Rick Smith, a publicist for the San Diego Chargers in the 1980s.