It’s the epitome of surfer-dude slang: totally gnarly dude!
Thinking about the word today though, it seemed a strange fit for surfing slang. Surely, I thought, it’s related to gnarled, as in knobbly, rough, or twisted. Not how you’d describe a wave really, is it?
No, but the word leant itself well to drifting towards meaning difficult or dangerous, and a gnarly wave is therefore a difficult one, that provides an appropriate challenge for a surfer.
Tubular, another stereotypical piece of surfer slang, is a little more straightforward, and is one I’m proud to admit I figured out myself in a moment of random thought. A really difficult, big wave with a crest curving forward so much that it almost touches the surface of the water would be quite literally tubular in its resemblance to a tube!
Gnarly dude!
Nice catch on the link to gnarled. That knotty, twisted sense never really left, which is why gnarly can sound like praise or a warning depending on who says it. A skater calling a trick gnarly is impressed; a doctor describing a gnarly fracture is not, and a programmer’s gnarly bug is simply a hard one. Surfers seem to have started with the dangerous-wave sense you describe, and the approving ‘awesome’ meaning grew out of it, so the word now carries both at once. Tubular is a lovely piece of self-made etymology, too, and far less ambiguous!
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