use of "my bad"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Hence the acro, "FWIW."

JL

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: use of "my bad"
>
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>
> On May 29, 2009, at 7:36 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:
>
> > The 1986 Wielgus & Wolff ex. was discovered by me. The seeming
> > childishness
> > of the phrase, combined with a paucity of good cites, kept it out of
> > HDAS
> > I.
>
> what's the surrounding context?  i ask because there's a repeated
> suggestion that the early uses were specifically from black basketball
> players, in which case cites might be hard to come by.
>
> but "seeming childishness" is problematic.  you came across the
> expression and asked yourself who would talk like that, and *given
> your prior experience* your impression was that it sounded like
> something a child would say.  but that's not the question to ask.  the
> right question is: who are the people using this expression, and what
> are they doing with it?  in the case at hand, they were pickup
> basketball players, and i doubt that the expression seemed at all
> childish to *them*.
>
> the problem is that you're projecting your own attitudes onto the
> speakers.
>
> >  Naturally, within a few months of publication (April 1994), I was
> > hearing it frequently on campus.
>
> the OED has a 1986 UNC-CH Campus Slang cite, already not in a sports
> context.
>
> > FWIW, I doubt that "my bad" enjoyed much currency anywhere before
> > the early
> > '80s except possibly as baby talk. FWIW.
>
> do we have any evidence that it was *ever* used as baby talk?
>
> arnold
>
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