"Break bad": 2; "break nasty": 0

[Wilson Gray]

No doubt, Ben. Thank you for the correction. WRT to the meaning, that
could certainly vary from place to place and from time to time. I
first heard both "break nasty" and "break bad" in Los Angeles in the
'Sixties, where they both pretty much meant the same as the old, even
when I was but a tad, "jump salty." IIRC, "break nasty" implied a
certain element of surprise or unexpectedness. I.e. :

"I was just asking him could he loan me a Benny and the dude broke
nasty on me, man!"

That is, instead of saying some expectedly-conciliatory bullshit like:

"Aw, man, shoot! I can't do you no solid. If I had the bread, I'd
*make* you take it!"

the dude said something unexpectedly hostile like:

"Get out my face, broke-assed motherfucker! Why don't you get you a
job or something, instead of always be
begging?!"

As opposed to something like:

"If you're going to be hitting on another stud's old lady, you got to
be *knowing* that he's going to break bad on your disrespecting ass!"

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Break bad": 2; "break nasty": 0
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 12:23 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> In HDAS, there occurs the idiom, "break bad." However, "break nasty,"
>> a slightly older idiom with exactly the same meaning, which, IMO, is
>> way cooler, does *not* appear in HDAS. I've hassled poor Jon about
>> this to the extent that he has promised to take official note of
>> "break nasty," at some point. [Here, I should note that I was just
>> shucking and jiving with all of that mess, Jon. You can just ignore
>> all the crap that I've given you WRT "break nasty."] Recently, a movie
>> has been released with the title, Breaking Bad.
>>
>> So, "break bad" is in HDAS and in a movie title, whereas "break nasty"
>> has yet to appear in print, b n, 2; b b, 0.
>
> Wilson, I think you might be talking about the cable series "Breaking
> Bad" on AMC (Season 2 starts in March), about a chemistry teacher who
> starts up a meth lab to support his family. Here's how the star of the
> show, Bryan Cranston, explained the expression:
>
> ----
> http://blogs.amctv.com/breaking-bad/2008/03/live-chat-with.php
> The term "breaking bad" is a southern colloquialism and it means when
> someone who has taken a turn off the path of the straight and narrow,
> when they've gone wrong.
> ----
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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>

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