Wank bank
A person's mental collection of attractive memories and images deposited for later private withdrawal. No internet connection required.
What it means
A wank bank is a person’s mental archive of attractive memories, images, and fantasies, stored in the mind for later private use. Think of it as a savings account, but instead of compound interest you get compound imagination. There is no app for it, nothing to log into, and nothing for anyone to subpoena. It is simply the contents of your own head, filed away with varying degrees of organisational rigour.
The term combines the obvious noun with the metaphor of a bank: you make deposits (an attractive stranger on the 8:15 to Paddington, a memorable encounter, that one summer), and you make withdrawals when the occasion calls for it. The interest rates, we are told, are not unattractive.
Where it comes from
The genius of “wank bank” is that it rhymes, which is how the best British slang earns its keep. It has been in common use since at least the 1990s, though the concept it describes is obviously as old as human imagination itself. Before broadband, before the top shelf, before someone’s older brother’s questionable VHS collection, the wank bank was the only resource that never ran out of stock, never required a trip to the newsagent, and never got found by your mum during a bedroom tidy.
It is worth noting that the wank bank predates cloud storage by several decades and yet operates on remarkably similar principles: always available, synced across locations, and absolutely not something you would let someone else browse through.
How it is used
The phrase appears most naturally in two contexts. First, the moment of deposit, when someone or something is deemed worthy of long-term mental storage. Second, in frank (though not too frank) conversation about one’s personal resources.
“Did you see the new barista at the coffee place on the high street?” “Mate. Straight into the wank bank. Premium account.”
“How are you coping since the breakup?” “Fine, thanks. Built up quite a healthy wank bank over five years. Living off the interest, really.”
The phrase carries no shame whatsoever. If anything, a well-stocked wank bank is spoken of with a certain quiet pride, like a well-tended allotment or a respectable ISA. Nobody brags about it (that would be un-British), but nobody apologises for it either.
Someone described as peng or fit is, in the parlance, a strong candidate for deposit. The assessment is instantaneous. The filing system varies from person to person, though we are reliably informed that most people’s internal cataloguing would not withstand an audit.
The modern wank bank
The internet has not made the wank bank obsolete. If anything, it has created a curious tension: unlimited material is now available at all times, and yet the mental archive persists. Some memories simply outperform anything a search engine can locate. The wank bank is, in financial terms, a portfolio of blue-chip holdings that require no management fees.
There is also the practical matter of situations where one’s phone is not to hand, the wifi is inadequate, or the context makes browsing inadvisable (see: stealth wank). In these moments, the wank bank proves its worth as the original offline mode. It has never buffered, it has never asked you to verify your age, and it has never suggested you might also enjoy something you would rather not think about.
We at SmartWank would never claim to replace the wank bank. That would be like claiming to replace the imagination, which would be both arrogant and incorrect. We merely supplement it. Consider us the current account to your long-term savings.
See also
For the physical equivalent of wank bank deposits, see top shelf. For the vocabulary used when making a deposit in real time, see peng. Or browse the full dictionary for further terms you will struggle to explain to your nan.