[Ads-l] Carry - "(to) humble", "humiliate", "lower one's dignity"

[Ben Zimmer]

A related sense of "carry" did make Connie Eble's Fall 2016 UNC-Chapel Hill
slang list, as noted in GDoS.

https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/aibvana
2016 C. Eble (ed.) UNC-CH Campus Sl. Fall 2: CARRY -- tease, jokingly
insult: "You’re carrying me because I’m short."


On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 2:20 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> Interestingly, not in DARE.
>
> LH
>
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 1:22 PM Z Sohna <zrice3714 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I tried searching to see if anyone had already written about the word
> > “carry” among Native Black Americans, but I couldn’t find anything in the
> > archives. However, for anyone exposed to Native Black Americans from
> North
> > Carolina, DC, Maryland, or Virginia, you’re likely already familiar with
> > this usage of “carry”. The definitions are as follows:
> >
> > “to humble”,
> > “to lower someone in dignity” (I actually saw this definition on a
> website
> > and it is exactly how I would define it as well)
> > “to humiliate”
> > “to embarrass”
> > “to treat someone as if said person is unimportant or irrelevant”
> >
> > Though it’s often attributed to DC, I’ve documented this usage among
> > elderly speakers from Virginia and North Carolina. Considering the
> history
> > of DC, this should not be surprising.
> >
> > The following are usage examples that are freely available on the
> internet:
> >
> >           "You *carry* me & don’t care but when I humiliate you , I
> suppose
> > to care ? Yeah ok”.
> >           https://twitter.com/morgvnn__/status/1489664655836463111
> >
> >           "How can you disrespect and *carry* somebody who is always
> there
> > for you no matter wat the situation is”
> >           https://twitter.com/___Quanda/status/564623856816504832
> >
> > This Native Black American usage of “carry” is an Africanism - a calque
> > derived from the Igbo *buda* “to humble”, “to humiliate”, “to degrade”
> > (from the Igbo *bu*- “to carry” + Igbo *da-* “an Igbo suffix that
> indicates
> > the downward nature of the verb to which it is affixed”); literally “to
> > carry (down)".
> >
>

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