Hit Me Up

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Gary Lehman. I’m in Hillcrest, San Diego, California.

I’ve been there. What’s up, Gary?

Well, I have a question about words. The phrase is, hit me up.

Now, as you probably know, hit me up can mean a number of different things.

And what I’ve discovered recently is that hit me up means call me or communicate with me by cell phone, text message, instant message.

It means to contact me.

And so I’m curious as to the etymology of this particular phrase, because it’s kind of a dividing line.

If you ask older people what does hit me up means, they’re going to suggest that it’s asking you for something.

Right, like money or something like that.

Specifically money.

Well, Gary, how did you hear about this?

Online, I’m a musician, and I’m trolling Craigslist, looking for work.

And so all the people who have ads looking for musicians, none of whom are paying any money, by the way, they all say, hit me up.

Sure, right, yeah.

Meaning call me.

It means communicate with me.

It doesn’t necessarily mean call.

I don’t think it means call.

They’ll hit me on my beeper, hit me on my cell, hit me on my burner, right?

Yeah.

Burner.

Hit me, hit me.

Yeah.

And so I’m…

Hit me on my burner.

I’ve done some research online.

I can’t come up with the, you know, the the derivation.

Where does C change?

Because, I mean, that’s pretty drastic.

Words are supposed to communicate instantly if possible.

And that just doesn’t sound like good communication, you know.

Hit me up.

Yeah, but Gary, slang is, and this is patently slang, slang is always a little bit cloudy.

It always excludes one group or another, doesn’t it?

It does.

And, you know, it’s colorful.

It makes language more entertaining.

But I can’t find exactly where it came from.

Let’s just say that this kind of thing is almost impossible to trace back to its ur form, as you put it.

Yeah.

And also, but let’s look at hit for just a second.

Hit is a partner in a lot of phrasal verbs.

Hit plus a variety of prepositions means a lot of things.

Hit me means to give me another card at blackjack or to actually punch me in the face, right?

Right.

Or to hit on means to, you know, use a come online with somebody.

Or to hit back means to launch a revenge or, you know, a counterattack.

There’s a lot of different ways that hit can play out here.

And so what I’m going to say to you is have you considered the possibility that hit me on my cell phone is not directly descended from hit me up for money?

Well, it’s probably not.

But the casual listener will be confused of the meaning.

Yeah.

That’s my concern.

Yeah, I agree with you, Garrett.

But clearly, where you’re picking this up in Craigslist, they’re not interested in communicating with people who aren’t part of their peer group.

They are assuming that if you understand them, you’re an insider.

And so you are one of their people, and you are going to understand that means call me.

There’s no better way that communication is about getting somebody’s attention.

There’s no better way of getting somebody’s attention than to hit them.

You got a point there.

Yeah, but hit is kind of a generic verb.

Depending on how it’s partnered with prepositions and other words become a phrasal verb, it just means an instance of something or to act upon or to affect.

And so hit in its basic form doesn’t necessarily mean to punch somebody or to make contact with somebody with your fist.

It sounds very Anglo-Saxon.

Well, I would think it is.

And very, very modern.

Well, thanks, folks.

Thank you very much.

If we come up with anything new on this, and it’s one of those things that you can keep trolling for.

It’s so hard to look for things with the word hid in them.

If I come up with anything new, I’ll post it to the forum, all right?

That’s wonderful.

Okay, thanks.

Take care, Gary. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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