Origin of Slang “Solid”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha and Grant. How are y’all doing today?

This is Julio Ferrari from Frisco, Texas.

Hi, Julio. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

I’m Brazilian. I studied English my entire life, and we moved to Texas 12 years ago.

And all the studying in the world didn’t prepare me for a couple of things.

First, it didn’t prepare me for the differences in the language.

First that you study abroad, and then the real language when you get here.

And it didn’t prepare me for all the Mexican food I’d be eating living in Texas.

So as soon as I got here, the first week I was here, I ate.

I mean, I really, in Brazil, you can’t find good Mexican food.

I’d been to the United States a few other times, but I was finally living here,

And I wanted to have as much Mexican food as I could.

But one day it really hit me, and things weren’t really doing very well in the restroom.

When I come out, and I mean, I was sick.

I could not stand up anymore.

This guy looks at me as, the look in his face of despair made me think he was at the same Mexican restaurant that I was.

So I leave the restroom.

He looks at me and says, dude, can you do me a solid?

And I’m like, wait a minute, I can’t even do a solid for myself right now.

What are you talking about doing me a solid?

What?

You know, and it took me a while to learn what that meant.

But studying, look, I studied English my entire life.

I’ve always been an Anglophile, but I cannot find anywhere why and where that comes from.

Oh, gracious.

Thanks for kind of, you know, telegraphing that in such a way that the details weren’t obvious.

That obvious.

That obvious.

All right.

So you’re Brazilian.

You sound very American to me.

But you’re still really interested in why we speak this messed up language called English.

Yeah.

I mean, Portuguese is probably one of the hardest languages to learn.

But when I came over here, I actually learned Spanish as well.

And that wasn’t hard at all.

But English, what you study overseas and what the language really is when you get here are two completely different things.

Yeah, I found that to be true in French as well.

Many languages are like that.

The book language is nothing like the street language.

Yep.

So if somebody wants to do you a solid, that means they want to do you a favor, right?

Yep.

So they’re going to do something good for you.

We’ve got a really brief recent history of this word.

It dates back to the 1960s or so.

But it comes from the idea of a solid service.

It’s elliptical in a way.

So you don’t say, I’m going to do you a solid service.

You just say, I’m going to do you a solid.

We made a noun out of the adjective.

And it’s roughly associated with Black English, although it hasn’t been only there.

That’s pretty much it.

We still find some variance, maybe in some prison lingo as far back as the 1920s,

Where a solid was a prison inmate who was trustworthy.

It’s the same sort of idea.

A solid, again, just a plain old solid as a noun, not as an adjective,

Was somebody that you could give your supplies to and they wouldn’t be stolen or lost.

There’s another note that I want to make here, Julia.

I don’t know how old you are.

You sound young to me.

20s?

I’m 34.

34, okay.

My colleague, Connie Ebley, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,

Collects slang from her English students every year.

And it’s funny.

You’ll get these late teens, early 20s students year in and year out putting down

Do Me a Solid as slang that they use and slang that they think of as belonging to them in

Their era, even though it dates back to their parents’ generation in the 1960s.

Julio, your accent is amazing.

I keep listening for Brazilian Portuguese, which is just one of my favorite languages.

And I’m just not hearing it.

How long have you been here?

How long have you been working on English?

Well, I’ve been here for 12 years now,

And I’ve really worked on trying to get the accent right

And a lot of exercises, and I’ve got a good year for those things.

Sure, so.

I’ve learned English my entire life, literally.

I went to an American school in Brazil, and, yeah, so I did study a lot.

But now I’m training on my Spanish to get it to where people already don’t recognize.

They don’t think I’m Mexican, but they don’t recognize where my accent’s from.

All right.

Cool.

Thank you so much for your call.

Thank you very much.

We say in Portuguese, muito obrigado.

Obrigado.

Ciao, ciao.

Bye-bye.

Ciao.

Tudo bem.

Ciao.

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