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...
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...
Mark from Los Angeles, California, asks about gank, slang for stealing, as in ganking someone’s fries. The verb is strongly associated with African American Vernacular English and appears in hip-hop lyrics at least as early as a 1987 NWA song...
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...
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...