A dancer in the Broadway production of The Lion King says he and his colleagues are curious about the use of the term “Auntie” (pronounced AHN-tee) to refer to an older woman, regardless of whether she’s a blood relative. Auntie is...
In today’s schools, mean girls might dismiss a classmate who wears Ugg boots, drinks sugary lattes, and listens to Top 40 radio as basic. This adjective for a slightly vapid, mainstream trend-follower first showed up in hip-hop lyrics around...
The organization Historic Hudson Valley describes the African-American celebration of Pinkster in an exemplary way. It avoids the use of the word slave and instead uses terms such as enslaved people, enslaved Africans, and captives. It’s a...
The term “spitting game,” meaning “to flirt,” comes from African-American slang going back to at least the 1960’s, when game referred to someone’s hustle. It’s well covered in Randy Kearse’s Street...
Learning that fat meat is greasy, which means learning something the hard way, is a common idiom used almost exclusively in the African-American community, and refers to a juicy cut of the pig called fatmeat. Linguist Geneva Smitherman has a great...
A Spotswood, Virginia, listener came across the phrase “steppin’ and fetchin'” used in a positive way to describe a speedy race run by the great horse Secretariat. But the phrase has an ugly past. To step and fetch is how many...