"Right on"

[Kathy Seal]

These are fascinating answers. So if "right on" existed in 1968 in dialect,
is there any way of finding out whether white students would have used it
yet? Clearly they did later on.

Kathy
KATHY SEAL
310-452-2769
Coauthor, Motivated Minds: Raising Children to Love Learning (Holt, 2001)
www.Kathyseal.net

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wilson Gray" <wilson.gray at RCN.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 2:35 PM
Subject: Re: "Right on"


> ---------------------- Information from the mail
header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <wilson.gray at RCN.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Right on"
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
>
> On Nov 10, 2004, at 12:42 PM, Jonathon Green wrote:
>
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Jonathon Green <slang at ABECEDARY.NET>
> > Subject:      Re: "Right on"
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > --------
> >
> > It's certainly in the 1968 edition of _Current Slang_ III:2, subtitled
> > 'The Slang of Watts'. I think Jesse might be being a trifle
> > restrictive; I
> > definitely recall being very well aware of the term in mid-late 1969,
> > certainly in the context of working on the London 'underground press',
> > albeit at that stage for the short-lived UK edition of a still
> > relatively
> > radical Rolling Stone. In other words, we were far, both lit. and fig.,
> >  from the Black Panthers.  We probably picked it up through the old UPS
> > (the Underground Press Syndicate, via which all such papers circulated
> > material).
> >
> > Jonathon Green
> >
>
> I'm with Jonathon on this one. The phrase, "right on," occurs in the
> play (there was a musical version starring Muhammad Ali and staged in
> San Francisco; I'm talking about the original play, which was staged in
> Los Angeles), "Big-Time Buck White," starring nobody that anybody ever
> heard of. I'm not sure when the play was written - I saw it in 1968 -
> but it was definitely in print by 1969 (published by Black Cat Books, a
> subsidiary of Grove Press). And, given that the author is Joseph Dolan
> Tuotti, judging by his name, it's also rather unlikely that he was a
> Panther.
>
> Historical note. For the record, the Black Panthers did not have a
> serious presence in Watts or in any other section of Los Angeles. The
> greater Los Angeles area was the territory of the US(A) - the United
> Slaves (of America). "Whe'evuh we *ah*, US *is*!" [I've always loved
> this slogan for the way that it puns on the grammar of "Negro
> dialect."] Maulana Ron Karenga, the Huey Newton of US, was, the last I
> heard, a professor of sociology at the State University of California,
> Long Beach. Huey Newton, of course, is dead.
>
> -Wilson Gray