Hooah !

[Wilson Gray]

I checked the list through a couple of the C's. Most were new to me,
but some of them are two days older than water. A couple of the
examples - act the fool  fo' sho'  buck wild - probably date back to
slavery. "Click" is, of course, merely a misspelling of the word that
we all know and love as "clique," which has ben a part of BE since
mother was a girl, to use a phrase that hasn't been used since mother
was a girl. And "cracker" as a slang word for a white person is
laughable to anyone old enough to remember when "cracker" to Georgia
was like "hoosier" to Indiana. "The Atlanta Crackers" were the state's
major minor-league baseball team.

More later, perhaps.

-Wilson

On Aug 4, 2005, at 12:58 AM, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Hooah !
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> On Thu, 4 Aug 2005 00:30:01 -0400, Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM>
> wrote:
>
>> In the '60's in L.A., "die-yow," also onomatopoetic for a gunshot, was
>> in very brief vogue as a slang term for "excellent": "Man, that chick
>> has some die-yow hips," wherein "hips" is a slang euphemism for
>> "buttocks." For some reason, the bruz tended to interpret "die-yow" as
>> an ordinary word. Naturally, if you do that, then the example sentence
>> has no discernable meaning. The hiperati tired of being asked what
>> they
>> were talking about. So, this bit of slang died a-borning.
>
> I believe a more recent equivalent would be "tadow".
>
> -----
> http://www.voxcommunications.com/ytadow.htm
>
> Tadow
> Wow! Usually said in reference to an attractive woman.
>
> Audio: http://www.voxcommunications.com/tadow.wav
> -----
>
> That's taken from a collection of teen/hiphop slang compiled by Oakland
> high school teacher Mark Frey. Here's the full list:
>
> http://www.voxcommunications.com/slang15.htm
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>