I am stoked. You are stoked. He/she is stoked. It’s a slang word much beloved of the surfing community and when you are stoked you are feeling the bliss that only a heavy session of surfing can bring.
It’s not something we say around the windsurfing club, not because we don’t feel “stoked”, but because most of us are European and instead say things like “Gosh, that was fun; now I need a cup of tea.”
But if you are American you are quite comfortable to announce that you are stoked on a regular basis. And so it was that Craig and I discovered a quite different style of communication when we discussed a potential magazine article with an American publisher.
Subscribers may recall a trip on SUPs down the river Kwai last year. It was a good story and we had some good photos, so we contacted Standup Paddle magazine to see if they were interested.
Were they interested? Much more than that. They were “stoked” to be working with us, they were “psyched” by the photos, the text that Craig supplied was “awesome”. We were “cool dudes”. The flow of inappropriate superlatives never stopped and it was hard to know how to respond. Should we profess to be stoked and psyched as well? Was this opportunity to have our story in such a prestigious magazine awesome?
Well, yes, but of course our natural reserve restricted us. What we should have replied with was “Hey dude, it’s awesome that you want to work with us, we are totally stoked and, like, psyched”, but we reduced this to a rather feeble “Thanks so much, jolly good”.
Anyway, a couple of months of awesome dudeness from America and stilted responses from us, and we had a page of photos and text ready for publication. The magazine features awesome (see, I can do it if I try) photos of icons such as Laird Hamilton dropping down a monster wave face on the North Shore in Hawaii, whereas all we were offering were some pics of some normal people of varying fitness floating down a river. So we appreciated that this was not something for which we could expect any form of monetary compensation, other than some good publicity for the sport in Thailand.
Which means we needed some copies of the magazine. Sadly, distribution in Thailand had stopped once the distributors discovered that people were not prepared to pay 775 baht for a glossy magazine featuring photos of people on boards. So, instead of money, we asked the publisher to send us several copies of the magazine so we could distribute amongst the participants and the manufacturer of our SUP boards who is based in Thailand. We felt this was a fair price for the photos and article we had contributed.
And indeed the publisher said he would be psyched to send us some copies, and a package arrived yesterday; containing just one copy; which presumably we will have to circulate around all the people who need to see it. I told the publisher that I was jolly pleased to receive one copy, but what happened to the several copies he had initially promised us? “Budget constraints, dude.”
Not stoked.