Ghetto/nigger-rig

[Jonathan Lighter]

I first encountered _ghetto_, adj., on a student slang last way back in 1997.  It was defined, in typically vague undergrad fashion, as "something bad."

  _Scary Movie 2_ (2001) includes the line, "Some people is so ghetto !"  That was also the year I began to hear it on the Springer show, used almost exclusively by black guests.

  A preliminary definition might be, "exemplifying stereotypical, lower-class black attitudes, tastes, or behavior; (_chiefly in African- American contexts_) meretricious; unsophisticated; crude."

  JL
Doug Harris <cats22 at FRONTIERNET.NET> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Doug Harris
Subject: Re: Ghetto/nigger-rig
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Beyond being offensive, such terms as nigger-rig are, IMHO, more
than a wee bit ironic, too:
If that term is supposed to mean something has been made to "just
barely work", it could be imagined that the fixer had, at the VERY
least, the git-up-and-go to get (whatever) working AGAIN, even if
not quite to designed-for standards.
And truth be told, the person who caused (whatever) to be dysfunctional
more'n likely was a chromatically disadvantaged person, as I am.
--
And I'm curious as to who uses the term 'reggin'. That sounds like a
construction that might have been arrived at by a rapper.
(the other) doug

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Wilson Gray
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 1:50 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Ghetto/nigger-rig



Hasn't it been proclaimed that racism is dead? New formations such as
"niggerbox" for boombox and "nigger-rig" as a replacement for
"jury-rig," as well as pswaydo-euphemisms like "reggin ("nigger"
spelled backward) weed" for low-quality grass make the 21st-century
appear to be only numerically distinct from the 20th.

-Wilson

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