slamb

Slam probably comes from a Scandinavian source — Norwegian slambe or Swedish dialect slamb, meaning to do something with a sudden, violent motion. The word appeared in English in the late seventeenth century as a verb meaning to shut forcefully. Doors slammed. Windows slammed. The word was onomatopoeic — it sounded like what it described.

Card games claimed the word in the 1620s. A 'slam' in whist (and later bridge) is winning all the tricks in a hand. A 'grand slam' is winning all thirteen tricks. The connection to violence is metaphorical: to slam your opponents is to defeat them completely, leaving them nothing. The term transferred to tennis (winning all four major tournaments in one year, first used in 1933), baseball (a home run with bases loaded, 1930s), and other sports that had a concept of total victory.

The poetry slam was invented by Marc Kelly Smith at the Green Mill jazz club in Chicago in 1986. Smith organized competitive poetry readings where audience members judged performers numerically. He called it a slam — borrowing from sports the idea of intense, competitive performance. The word brought aggression and urgency to poetry, which was exactly Smith's intention. He wanted to rescue poetry from quiet academic recitation.

The basketball slam dunk was named in the 1960s. The forceful, downward act of jamming the ball through the hoop was a slam — violent, sudden, definitive. The dunk was already called a 'dunk' (from dunking food in liquid). Adding 'slam' added violence. A slam dunk became a metaphor for a sure thing — something so obvious and forceful that it cannot fail.