Cecily from Indianapolis, Indiana, asks whether expressions she first heard in African-American English, such as hit us up and it’s been a minute, have long moved from minority communities into majority speech. Covert prestige describes the cultural...
A San Diego, California, 12-year-old whose last name is Jones wonders: Why do so many African-Americans as well as European Americans share the same last name? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “The Common Name...
Among some African Americans, kitchen means the hair at the nape of the neck, the usage Mary in Kenai, Alaska, heard from her granddaughter. The Dictionary of American Regional English records it from the 1970s, and it is especially associated with...
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...
Boo, as in my boo for a sweetheart or other loved one, became especially visible in African-American speech and music in the mid-1990s, including in the song “My Boo” by Ghost Town DJs. The term is definitely older than that, though, and may have...
The song Old Dan Tucker has a long history in the United States, going back to the minstrel shows of the 1840s. Martha highly recommends the documentary Ethnic Notions about our country’s complicated history with racially-charged imagery in...
