Necessary Distance
Essays and Criticism
Excerpt - Rhythm: Talking That Talk

My interest in informal speech is long-standing. I edited two dictionaries of African American “slang,” an antidotal one in 1970, and a scholarly one in 1994. The latter was not an embellishment of the earlier one. The interest stems from two concerns: one, for the richness and the way informal speech nourishes formal speech, and two, for the ways I could possibly use that richness in my own writing.

            Slang has never had a consistently good reputation. Often it is characterized as much by arrogance, bigotry, sexism, and self-contempt as by humor, compassion, and wisdom. But it also happens to be the most alive aspect of our language. My goal, at least in part, was to help bring to the language we call slang a better name, a better reputation; and also to suggest, by the example of those dictionaries, how intrinsic it is to the quest of human culture to express and to renew itself.

            Also, there is the sense that slang is tolerated because, for the most part (in the minds of some critics), it belongs to the young, the youth culture, and there is the sense, or hope, that they will eventually grow out of it, advance to standard speech, which, the official guardians of the culture seem to hope, will signal their acceptance of the status quo. J. L. Dillard makes the point in Lexicon of Black English (1977), that the word slang itself has caused many people to take lightly or negatively a complex and rich language.

The general public has long associated slang with a transitory stage in the language development of teenagers, soon to be dropped by all except those few who never enter the adult, mainstream world. “Slang” was, for the average American, an exotic language phenomenon primarily for children outside the domain of working language and not really to be considered seriously. (p. 17)

Kids aside, maybe the case is more pervasive and serious than that. Slang has always been considered, by official watchers of culture, to be a threat to not only “proper” language but to “proper” society as well. Irving Lewis Allen, in his City in Slang: New York Life and Popular Speech (1993), takes a broader view:

Around 1850 the word slang, while in English a century earlier, became the accepted term for “illegitimate” and other unconventional speech. Disapproving comment on low speech forms, fueled by class anxieties in the changing city, probably helped establish the word slang in the United States. By 1900 the term had all its present meanings, including that of a vocabulary regarded as below standard and that threatened proper, genteel usages. . . . Street speech . . . expressed the troublesome spirit of the social underside of the industrial city: unconventional, experimental without license, insubordinate, scornful of—or merely careless of—authority. These locutions spread rapidly and began to be noticed, recorded, and deemed something of a social problem. (pp. 22-23)

The way black jazz and blues musicians have been talking, say, since the latter part of the nineteenth century, might be seen as an outstanding example of this rebellion Allen speaks of. In fact, Robert S. Gold, in his introduction to A Jazz Lexicon (1964), supports Allen’s claim, saying that there is an “essential rebelliousness at the heart of both the music and the speech” (xviii). And I would go so far as to say that all alive art is rebellious, and all alive speech, slang or otherwise, is rebellious, rebellious in the healthy sense that they challenge the stale and the conventional.

            African American slang cuts through logic and arrives at a quick, efficient, interpretative solution to situations and things otherwise difficult to articulate. It serves as a device for articulating every conceivable thing imaginable—the nature of sex, the taste of food, social relationships, life itself, and death. Just as the word “Watergate” explains a vast and complex incident, a word like “bondage,” to refer to being “in debt,” or a phrase like “jump the broom,” to explain that somebody will get married, makes the point quickly with a strong, clear, symbolic gesture, and a sense of vibrant, alive humor.

            Black slang is a living, breathing form of expression that changes so quickly no researcher can keep up with it. A word or phrase can come into existence to mean one thing among a limited number of speakers in a particular neighborhood and a block away it might mean something else or be unknown entirely—at least for a while.

            One group of speakers—such as a gang, a social club, or even a whole neighborhood—may feel the need for secrecy from another gang, social club, or neighborhood only just around the corner. At this point, when it is most private, this mode of speech thrives and is at its most effective. It is the classic example of a secret tongue. At the same time, both groups will feel the need to maintain a rapidly changing vocabulary unknown to the larger, mainstream culture, known generally or loosely as white America. The need for secrecy is part of the reason for the rapid change.

            Since the days of slavery, this secrecy has served as a form of cultural self-defense against exploitation and oppression, constructed out of a combination of language, gesture, body style, and facial expression. In its embryonic stages during slavery, the secrecy was a powerful medium for making sense out of a cruel and strange world. African American slang is a kind of “home talk” in the sense that it was not originally meant for listeners beyond the nest.

            As is always the case with informal private talk, it becomes, formally speaking, informal language—slang—when it reaches the larger speaking population. In other words, slang is, in a sense, a corruption of the more private forms of informal speech, such as cant, argot, or jargon. This evolution from private to public is natural for the words and phrases strong enough to survive for any considerable length of time.

            But once such a transition is made, original meanings are very often lost. For example, “uptight” in the fifties, among the original group of black speakers who created the term, had a specific sexual reference. Once the phrase fell into general use, it took on a psychological meaning, referring to some sort of mental disturbance. This evolution from private to public is not only essential to the vitality at the crux of slang, but inevitable. By this I mean, African American slang is not only a living language for black speakers but for the whole country, as evidenced by its popularity decade after decade since the beginning of American history. The most recent example of this popularity is rap and hip-hop during the 1980s and the 1990s.

            One important aspect of this “aliveness” is its onomatopoeic tendency. How words sound has always interested black speakers. Zap, yacky-de-yack, bop, bebop, ticktock, O-bop-she-bam, hoochy-coochy, honkytonk—all have been popular at one time or another. Perhaps even more than any other type of slang words, onomatopoeic words deliver the pleasure of immediacy—the “sock!” (as in “sock it to me”).

            In a similar way, the rhyming jargon of black slang gives the same sort of satisfaction—especially for the pleasures of syncopated sound—as do rhyming terms such as Muhammad Ali’s “rope-a-dope.” Related in form is the language of rap and hip-hop. Rappers and would-be rappers carry on a tradition—just as the break dancing of the eighties followed the flash dancing of the forties—that started with pre-twentieth-century forms of playful, informal African American speech.

            Some rap and hip-hop words and phrases will enter the canon, just as in the past hip and jive words such as “dude” and “cool” ended up in general use and in dictionaries.

            While a certain vocabulary or idiom might please and serve one decade or generation, it will not necessarily work for the next. Changes in black slang word forms take place continually. It happens when speakers drop syllables, usually from the end or sometimes from the beginning of a word, such as “Bama” for Alabama, “cap” for “backcap,” “bam” for “bambita,” “bro” for “brother,” or “head” for “crackhead.”

            Other changes occur through shifts in the function of African American slang words. A noun, for example, might be used as a verb: “He boozed himself to death” or “I jived my way to Brooklyn.” Black speech is fluid in this way because it remains open to the influences of verbal forces from every conceivable direction.

            And it is important to remember that it is anonymous speakers who create and sustain the initial contents and shape of this language. Black social groups across the country are the homes of such anonymous speakers. Their talk draws on many levels of language, and popular culture in general, for its storehouse of words and phrases.

Let me return to an earlier point in order to complete the thought. The private talk of an African American gang or social club becomes slang when it reaches the larger African American community or communities. It continues to be slang from that point on as it moves out into the general American speaking public. But African American slang is not colloquialism; it is not dialect, not argot, not jargon or cant. Black slang is composed of or involves the use of redundancies, jive rhyme, nonsense, fad expressions, nicknames, corruptions, onomatopoeia, mispronunciations, and clipped forms.

            In this way, the collective verbal force of black speakers throughout the many black communities in America carries on the tradition of renewing the American language while resisting and using it. Yet African American informal speech and slang are quite distinct in many essential ways from common American speech and slang. There is a basic grammatical difference between black speech and American English. Today, in the 1990s, nouns, for example, tend to be repeated within a single sentence along with pronouns as they were 150 years ago. At the same time, the overall shape of African American slang is also influenced, through exchange and conflict, by American English words and phrases that are adjusted to the African forms.

            Again, for example, “This guy, he come at me out of nowhere.” Or, “The mayor, he done the best he could with an impossible situation.” Past, present, and future tenses are often not used in the expected order. No matter the subject, it gets the same verb form. Plurals are employed where in English structure they are not required. Sentences are commonly structured without the “to be” verb forms.

            To say it another way, what I am calling African American slang includes black dialect, but slang and idiom are not the same thing as dialect. Black speakers generally sound like other speakers of their regions. We know this as dialect. But African American slang, as late as the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, was still largely regionalized. If, in the thirties, a southern black speaker of slang came into contact with a northern black speaker of slang, neither one usually had any idea what the other was talking about.

            Today, in the nineties, just about every segment of the country is in touch with every other, due to television and radio, air travel and telephones, faxes and computers, so a homogenized form of African American slang has been emerging since the 1950s while dialects seem less altered by extra-regional influences

            This makes for a fertile language environment and for even more accelerated change in African American slang. It evolved over the decades best when the social and political atmospheres were most fluid and creative. A social environment that is accommodating is necessary for the evolution of any form of slang. African American communities have been generally receptive to slang, although it has had to evolve in a moral war zone between the secular position of street culture and the sacred position of the sisters and deacons of the black church.

            American society generally is receptive to slang. Slang never evolves in isolation. Black slang in particular uses the receptive American atmosphere to its own advantage while creating and maintaining a private language with its own center of gravity, integrity, and shape.

            Many of the words and phrases are borrowed from very specific cultural pockets in the country—from the drug scene, prison life, street life, entertainment, and especially the areas of blues and jazz. These categories are important areas upon which black slang draws. They are every bit as essential to the vitality of black slang as is the presence of the mainstream American cultural scene.

            This also means that, even when there is relatively little direct outside contact or communication between African Americans and other American social and racial subgroups, cross-fertilization—by way of television or whatever—is essential for the continuation of a private black alternative language—one that is, to some extent, destined to return to the white public arena from which it was borrowed.

            So it is useless to ask, “Why an alternative language? Why not one American tongue for every ethnic or social group?” Most African Americans, like most Americans of any ethnic group, are skilled in what is called the common American culture—and the American language is the instrument of that culture. Each group’s individual cultural identity is essentially established through the bond of its own distinctive expression. As is the case for other subcultures, African Americans are also skilled in their own racial culture. Informal speech is part of that culture, and they have many effective uses for informal speech. In daily life there are situations so sensitive or painful that slang often seems the only way to deal with them.

One of the primary functions of this language is its quest to create a coherent cultural construct of positive self-images. Though many of the words and phrases may sound harsh and even obscene to outsiders, the language is essential to the cultural enrichment of African Americans.

            Black speakers, in self-mockery, can call each other “nigger” and, in a sense, make null and void racial slurs of white bigots. As James Baldwin often said, “I told you first.” But the effectiveness of such a strategy, and its long-term psychological benefits, remains open to question. Yet it is a social phenomenon that has significant historical consensus simply by virtue of its long practice.

American English, perhaps more than any other language, has borrowed from other tongues, period. Black slang is a form of black speech and black speech is a form of American English, but in the early stages, say, in the sixteenth century, black speech was still close to its African roots. Such African words and phrases as “okra,” “cocacola,” “turnip,” “jazz,” “gorilla,” “banana,” and “juke” (as in “jukebox”), for example, became common symbols in American English. More important, African American speech and slang have contributed to the ultimate formation of formal American English. And not only through the process of African nonslang words entering the language, but also as slang words and phrases such as “ace boon coon,” “Afro,” “attitude,” “bad,” “not,” and so on, enter the mainstream formal language. Stuart Berg Flexner, in I Hear America Talking (1976), says:

When we heard America talking, we heard Blacks talking . . . The “we” is Black and White. . . . The Blacks have influenced the American language in two major ways (1) by using many of their native (Black African) words and speech, and (2) by causing, doing, being, influencing things that have had all America talking, often using terms created or popularized by the Black presence and expedience. (p. 31 )

            There are roughly four areas of African American slang: (1) the early southern rural slang that started during slavery, (2) the slang of the sinner-man/black musician of the period between 1900 and 1960, (3) street culture slang out of which rap and hip-hop evolved, and (4) working class slang. All areas are fully represented in this dictionary, from the beginnings of black people in this country to the present.

            The point, of course—and it’s a pity to have to stress it—is that not all black speech is “street speech.” But a surprisingly large number of Americans believe this to be so. “There are now thousands, perhaps millions, of black Americans who . . . have limited contact with vernacular black speech,” says John Baugh in Black Street Speech (1983). “Dialect boundaries therefore don’t automatically conform to racial groups. Then collectively, black Americans speak a wide range of dialects, including impeccable standard English” (p. 127).

            Not only has there been, historically speaking, geographically determined diversity to African American slang, but the Africans who made up the language out of Portuguese Pidgin, Bantu, and Swahili, primarily, created what was known early on as Plantation Creole. The persistence of Africanisms in the formation of black slang and African American culture generally can be seen as a grand testimony to the strength of the human spirit and to the cultural strength of that polyglot group of Africans dumped, starting in 1619, on this continent to work the land.

            But make no mistake, this is not another African language. And I am not pushing an Afrocentric program by spelling out the origins of this language. Black slang is an American language with distant roots in the ancient coastal tribes of central west Africa, as well as, indirectly, in Anglo-Irish culture and elsewhere.

            But perhaps more important than any of the above is this: African American speech and slang form is, in a sense, one of the primary cutting edges against which American speech—formal and informal—generally keeps itself alive.

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