Slang Term “Seditty”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Robin.

I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Robin. Welcome.

Hi, Robin. Hey, I had a question.

I know you all are real good with words, and I’ve had a word on my mind lately.

I was working from the South Side of Chicago and basically African-American community.

And we had a word that we say, especially talking about women or girls, when we were dating.

If a girl didn’t like you, you say, well, she’s a diddy. You know, stuck up. She didn’t like you. She’s got attitudes, blah, blah, blah.

And I wonder, first, if there is such a word as Sididi, and if so, how would you spell it?

I don’t have a clue. Somebody asked me once, I even heard a preacher say it in one of the sermons. He’s talking about some of you people, actually, Sididi.

And it came back. I mean, I haven’t heard it in years. I’ve been in Dallas 30 years almost. I haven’t heard the word used a lot down here, but I don’t even know where it would come from. It would be French or what? Sididi. Sididi.

And I imagine I guess it’s spelled with S or C, I don’t know. But I understand the meaning.

Like nowadays the word they say is bougie. You’re real bougie, you got an attitude that you’re better and that kind of stuff.

We would say it about girls, a lot of guys would say that about the girls. They were so ditty, they didn’t want to talk to us. Look down your nose at them. And they knew what it meant.

Yes indeed, as a matter of fact, this is a classic piece of black American vernacular English. This is one of those words that has never migrated into any other dialect of English.

And a lot has been written about this, too. Clarence Majors has written about it. Deneva Smitherman has written about it.

Well, at least they’ve included it. It’s kind of a marker for how well you are integrated into the black community that you even know the word.

It’s one of those words that if you’re kind of like on the fringe of different kinds of communities or different kinds of groups or ethnic behaviors, you may not know it.

Say if you come from, say, black Latin communities, you might not know the word. But if you’re African American with a history of people who’ve come from the South in general, you’re more likely to know it.

So anyway, yeah, definitely know this word. I’m not surprised if the spelling is confusing. I’ve count one, two, three, four, five different ways that this word has been spelled.

S-I-D-D-I-T-Y is one of the most common ones.

Wow, so you have lots of options.

Yeah, or S-A-D-I-T-T-Y or S-A-D-I-D-D-Y. I believe that was probably close to what I would guess because I didn’t have a clue.

I didn’t know if you would spell it with a C or an S. When do you think you first heard it?

Oh, I was probably five or six years old.

Okay, that makes sense. The earliest use that I know about is from a book from 1948, although I’m quite sure that it’s much older than that.

There are a number of different places online where people have digitized African-American newspapers from around the country. And you can find this word being used on a regular basis, sometimes without explanation, in opinion columns and in letters and in stories that are included in these newspapers.

So it’s got a long history. It’s pretty consistent, even used well into the present day.

Although you do tend to find it more in novels these days than you would in just everyday street speech or something that was somebody saying on the radio.

Well, Robin, I have to confess, I’ve never heard it. I’ve seen it in these texts, you know, but I love hearing it.

I mean, I mean, I mean, and everybody, all the African-Americans, we knew what it meant from you. But I’ve never seen it written. I have some clues I go look at and see what it looks like in writing.

But it’s just one of those things you hear and just wonder, well, how would you even spell that? And everybody knew. I mean, everybody, all the African-Americans knew.

A few of the whites knew, none of Hispanics knew. You say, okay, we’ve heard that word before.

Yeah, there we go. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

African Americans tend to almost always at least have heard their grandma or their auntie use this word. White folks almost never know this word unless they spend a lot of time, say, in black churches or live in a black community.

And Latinos and Hispanics, they’ve never heard this word at all.

No, they didn’t, no. Well, I appreciate that. That clears one thought off my mind now.

Okay. Super duper, Robin. Call us anytime you have one of those.

Yeah. All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thanks a lot, Robin. Bye-bye.

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