_Break nasty_ = "jump salty"

Mark Mandel thnidu at GMAIL.COM
Mon May 3 03:22:56 UTC 2010


Then there may well be a connection. And I shouldn't have called it "a Dr.
John song": Dr. John (Mack Rebennack) recorded a version of it on
"Gris-Gris" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gris-Gris), but I have no idea
whether he wrote it.

I found the album in the basement, and I still don't know. The song is
credited as "By Dr. John Creaux", another form of his in-character stage
name. But "Danse Kalinda Ba Doom" is credited "By Dr. John Creaux & Harold
Battiste", while the jacket notes (© 1968 Atlantic Recording Corporation)
suggest that it's based on a trad. song:

I HAVE ALSO DUG UP THE OLD DANSE KALINDA TO REMIND YOU WE HAVE NOT CHOPPED
OUT THE OLD CHANTS... [uppercase sic].

Maybe I'll ask the Digital Tradition / Mudcat Forum, but not tonight.

(Whoops, I see I conflated the idioms this morning, typing "jump nasty"
instead of "jump steady".)

Mark Mandel

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 7:57 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>wrote:

> I months or so ago I heard Louis Armstrong sing a number with the
> expression "Jump Study" in the refrain.  Definitely "Study", not "Steady"
> (which would make some sense) or "Sturdy"
>
> Probably dated from the later 1930s or ealy 1940s.
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com>
> Date: Sunday, May 2, 2010 10:51 am
> Subject: Re: _Break nasty_ = "jump salty"
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> > Interesting. I had not heard or seen either of these idioms before.
> >
> > "Jump nasty" immediately reminded me of a Dr. John song (N.Orleans,
> sixties
> > - present) with the chorus
> >
> > Jump Sturdy, Jump Sturdy was her name.
> > She came out the swamp like a crazy fool.
> >
> > But I don't see any plausible connection. (The song, titled "Jump
> Sturdy",
> > is on his first LP, "*Gris-Gris"*, issued in the late sixties.)
> >
> > m a m
> >
> > On Sat, May 1, 2010 at 6:04 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Now in UD, with a surprising-reasonable set of definitions, from 2005.
> > >
> > > Otherwise, as far as the Web is concerned, _break nasty_ occurs only
> > > in the environment immediately before "... habits."
>
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list