“Talking Game” Came Before “Spitting Game” in Romantic Slang

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi.

This is Brandy from Milwaukee.

Hey, Brandy from Milwaukee.

How you doing?

I’m well, and you?

Gooby, what can we do for you?

I heard the phrase spitting game used to refer to the way a young man might try and talk to a woman if he likes her.

And this came up in a discussion about love and keeping love alive.

And one of the people in this group who was about 50, he said back in his day, the guy wanted to talk to a girl, they would call it rapping.

And so he asked, I don’t know, you know, what do we call it today?

And a person who’s about 20, she put spitting game out there.

Yeah, there we go.

That’s it.

Spitting game.

That doesn’t sound very romantic to me.

It doesn’t sound very romantic at all.

We’ve got some history here.

We can break this down into component pieces and learn a little bit more about it if you want.

Okay.

The part that interests me the most about this is game.

I love the idea of game as what you’re up to.

Your game is your strategy.

And it definitely comes from African-American English, probably dates easily into the 1960s, maybe older than that.

And for a long time, game was just how you behaved on the street, how you behaved around your friends, how you behaved when you were hustling, when you’re out there trying to make money or get a job or do whatever it took to get by.

And then you start to see pop up in the 1970s people talking game, and it’s exactly the same meaning.

They’re talking game meaning, oh, I saw this sweet lady, and I talked some game to her, and we’re going out tomorrow night, going to the clubs.

And then 1990s or so, maybe even a little earlier, two bits of slang merged.

We already had to spit, meaning to talk, but it came from rapping.

It came from the old school emcees in the club doing their thing live on the microphone.

You know, not for tape, not for a CD, not for recording.

It just, you know, think of the late 70s, early 80s.

Maybe you’ve seen some of the movies about the time period.

If you’re on the mic, you’re spitting.

You’re spitting rhymes.

You’re spitting lyrics.

And then so later, by the 1990s, spit joined game.

So instead of talking game, you started spitting game, which means you are telling a lady everything that you have in mind for the two of you to become a couple and get to know each other better.

It’s your best shot.

Yeah, it’s your best shot.

For a while there, you might have said you were macking on somebody, but we don’t really use that much anymore, do we?

Macking.

Yeah, you know that one?

Yeah, to mack on somebody is to hit on them.

Is that like Mac Daddy?

Yeah, it’s like that.

Okay.

Exactly, yeah.

Okay.

So that’s the short version.

If you want a book that’s got some good stuff on this, Brandy, take a look at Randy Kirst’s book, Street Talk.

It’s the official guide to hip-hop and urban slanguage.

He is very thorough in terms of what he includes.

He doesn’t take words very far back, but he’s got a pretty decent natural understanding of a whole big segment of slang that doesn’t get a lot of attention in most of the official dictionaries.

Okay awesome.

That’ll help me get around better in Milwaukee I think.

I’m new to this area and I’m hearing these expressions all the time and I want to know what’s going on.

Take care now Brandi.

Thank you you too.

Bye bye.

We’ll be in touch.

Have a great day.

Bye bye.

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