High school students in Alabama share some favorite slang terms. If someone tells you to touch grass, they’re telling you to get a reality check — but the last thing you’d actually want to touch is dog water! Also, the history of the word hangover...
We were invited by Huntsville, Alabama, public radio station WLRH to do a live appearance at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. During the Q&A, a listener shared a version of the phrase If I tell you a hen dips snuff, you can look under its wing (and...
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...
Particularly in the African-American community, the affectionate term son is often used for more than just young male offspring—most anyone can be addressed as son. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Addressing as “Son”” Hello, you...
Elise, a seventh-grade teacher in Dallas, Texas, noticed her students using finna in speech and notes, as in finna go to the store. It’s a tight contraction of fixing to, meaning “about to,” common in the American South and Gulf States and also in...
Conversate, a variation of the word converse, is part of African-American Vernacular English, but with a slightly different meaning. To conversate is “to converse raucously.” This word goes back to at least 1811, and it’s well-known to many African...