Frustrated by my own inability to perform a "nollie 360 flip to grind" and then "ride the hubba," I went web-crawling to the IGN Skate guide, which had this to say:

Paul Rodriguez's infamous challenge has a lot of players scratching their heads, but we suspect the problem has to do more with linguistics than anything else. If words like "hubba" are not in your lexicon, fear not. If anything, you should be proud, because it's just a silly name for the short, concrete wall that lines the stairs in this challenge.

I'd guessed at that meaning, but — as with my skater brother's impenetrable observation that I couldn't "nollie" a.k.a. "nose-ollie" if I was riding "switch" — some translation certainly helped matters.

The word hubba doesn't show up on this basic skateboard terminology list, but according to the kids at the Skateboard Dictonary [sic] forum, it has an interesting derivation.

What follows is the honest-to-Internet truth:

Reno_Rotary- A hubba is a ledge going down some stairs. I think they're names for the same thing, I don't think there's a definite difference between the two.

I think the name or nik-name hubba came from a famous spot in San Fransisco, the [Hubba Hideout]. Its just a ledge thats hidden back a little. Hubba was originally a slang term for crack [in that sense, from the exclamation hubba-hubba, it's been dated to 1988], or crackhead, and [Hubba Hideout] was originally an area where people used crack in public without being seen. Eventually hubba came to be slang for ledge. Who knows for sure though.

(One reply notes that the Hubba Hideout "was a major place for drugs and stuff, and the cops started to kick people out and arrest people so they skate stopped [!] it." That sucks... but isn't the verb skate stop awesome?)

Labels: dialect, etymology