"Reggin" redux

[Jonathan Lighter]

FWIW, the earliest media ex. of "reggin" I have is the jazz piece "Reggins," recorded by The Blackbyrds (of Howard University) in 1974.

JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: "Reggin" redux
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On 11/13/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> Subject: Re: "Reggin" redux
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> One expects the examples of usage to be racist, but most of the definitions are unusually vituperative - even for Urbandictionary.
>
> JL
>

Yes. I wouldn't have expected it. Hopefully, it's just a small,
self-selected group. OTOH, though, I guess that I should have expected
it. Consider the kind of anti-woman venom that you run across while
umsurfing. Uh, I don't mean to suggest that you personally necessarily
have any interest in umsurfing, but you gnome sane. ;-)

-Wilson


> Wilson Gray 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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--
-Wilson Gray


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