"Reggin" redux

[Jonathan Lighter]

One expects the examples of usage to be racist, but most of the definitions are unusually vituperative - even for Urbandictionary.

JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: "Reggin" redux
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The on-line Urban Dictionary supplies some fourteen definitions of "reggin"=
,
all of them racist. The posters aparently believe that "reggin" is some
brand-new racist term that can be used around black people because they're
too stupid to figure it out.

Absoloutely amazing, given that this merely "nigger" spelled backward and i=
s
BE slang that dates back to at least 1957, when I first heard it. At that
time, in Los Angeles, whites typically went to the beaches during the day t=
o
catch some rays and blacks typically went to the beaches at night to party.
The partying was aided by the presence on the beaches of so-called "fire
pits" in which it was legal to build a fire for light, roasting franks,
toasting marshmallows, etc. One day, an article appeared in the L.A. Times
that noted that all the fire pits were to be removed from the beaches. This
inspired the flollowing exchange, IIRC:

A. Well, y'all know what this means.
B. Yeah. No more reggins on the beaches.
--
-Wilson Gray


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