Transcript of “Trifling, Failing to do What Needs Doing”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Yes, hello, this is Michaelene Kelly.
Michaelene, welcome to the show. Where are you calling us from?
Grand Rapids.
Okay, well, what’s on your mind today?
Well, I wanted to talk about the word trifling.
It’s a word, T-R-I-F-L-I-N-G.
It’s related to trifle, obviously.
But I started hearing the word used by my family from Mississippi.
So I think the word is used by black people from the South or from Mississippi.
And its meaning, it’s a negative character trait, a longstanding character trait.
And it’s not exactly somebody that’s petty or lazy or unmotivated.
It refers to somebody who won’t do the slightest, most trivial thing or action to improve their situation.
Like not fixing something when it’s really easy to fix, so you don’t have a toilet because you’re too trifling to fix it.
Or, you know, you’re walking through your house, instead of picking something up, you just walk over it.
Or not finishing a project.
It’s somebody that can be relied on not to do the most trivial thing to help themselves.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
That’s it.
You’ve nailed it.
So your family in Mississippi, your African-American family in Mississippi, uses the word that way?
So I married into a Black family from Mississippi, and I had the privilege of hearing all kinds of idioms and words, expressions that I had never heard before.
To talk about trifling and focus on that, trifling really is an African-American word used in Black English.
It does refer to somebody who kind of lacks ambition or maybe that they’re deceitful or secretive or even a little suspicious acting.
I’d say somebody’s trifling and never keeps their promises.
Exactly.
Barack Obama uses it in his book Dreams from My Father.
He says, we’re trifling.
That’s what we are, trifling.
Here we are with a chance to show the mayor that we’re real players in the city.
So what do we do?
We act like star-struck children.
So he’s talking about somebody who had an opportunity and didn’t take it.
That’s trifling.
Yes. Yeah, lost opportunities.
But like I said, it seems like a long-standing character trait as opposed to a single trifling action.
Yeah, that’s a fair reading.
It is easy to read a lot into the contexts that might not be there for everyone.
So you will find other uses of trifling in other parts of African-American English that just are different because it’s not a—the boundaries of trifling in this way aren’t particularly strict.
So it does vary from neutral to very negative.
Okay.
But, Michaelene, I got to say, you have got a ton of information there.
It’s clear that you pay attention when people speak, and I appreciate that.
That’s important.
Well, it was a whole new language for me growing up in Chicago and moving to Michigan.
And being with the Black people from the South, I treasured spending time with them.
Their stories were so interesting.
The language is still so interesting.
And, yeah, I guess I’m a poet, and I love words, you know.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, keep that ear to the ground and continue what you’re doing.
Listening more than speaking is something that’s hard for a lot of people to do,
But it sounds like you’ve mastered it.
Sure does.
Thank you.
Take care of yourself now, all right?
Right. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, what have you observed about the language around you?
We’d love to hear about it.
