Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a fill-in-the-blank puzzle about famous hip-hop rhymes. For example, from Run DMC, there’s the verse: “I’m the king of rock / There is none higher / Sucker MC’s should call me _________.” This is part of a complete episode...
Spitting game, a way to describe flirting or making a romantic pitch, blends two strands of African-American English slang. Game in the sense of someone’s strategy, hustle, or practiced line goes back at least to the 1960s and may be older. By the...
Did you know reading poetry improves your prose? That includes hip-hop lyrics, too. Also, how linguist can guess where you come from based on how you speak. What do you call someone who picks the chocolate out of the trail mix? Plus, champing at...
Z-plurals are plurals that would end with an s but get a z instead, for style pointz. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Z Plurals” You know how in some hip-hop songs and albums, and maybe even on the signs for barbershops, they...
What is a buster? As TLC sang, “A scrub is a guy who thinks he’s fly, also known as a buster.” That is, a buster is that guy on the fringe who’s always putting on airs. The word may come from the old term gangbusters, which originally applied to...
You know how it is when you encounter a word and then suddenly you start noticing it everywhere? One that’s seemed to pop up is cray, or cray-cray, a slang variant of crazy. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Cray” There’s something...
