[Ads-l] "spaz(z)" redux

[Ben Zimmer]

Lizzo has revised the lyrics of her new song "Grrrls" to remove a lyric
that has been criticized as containing an ableist slur: "I'ma spaz" (or
"I'ma spazz").

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/14/1104925003/lizzo-rerecords-grrrls-criticism-ableism

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniesoteriou/lizzo-new-version-grrrls-backlash-lyrics-ableist-slur
https://thegrio.com/2022/06/14/lizzo-records-new-version-of-grrrls/

"I'ma" is also transcribed as "I'mma" or "Imma" -- see Neal Whitman on this
form (equivalent to "I'm gonna" in AAVE and elsewhere):

https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/dictionary/prime-time-for-imma/
https://literalminded.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/thoughts-on-imma/

Since it's "I'ma spaz" and not "I'm a spaz," we're dealing with the verb
"spaz" and not the noun. We've discussed both noun and verb here before,
and I wrote up some research on this for Language Log back in 2006:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003020.html

As I discuss there, "spaz" (noun and verb) emerged in the 1950s from
"spastic" (influenced by "spasm" and "spasmodic") but developed more
negative connotations in the UK than in the US. (At the time, Tiger Woods
apologized for saying "as I got on the green I was a spaz" in an interview
after the Masters -- he faced mostly UK backlash, as seems to be the case
with Lizzo now.)

An excerpt from the Language Log post:

---[begin excerpt]---
Many people report that _spaz_, meaning a clumsy or foolish person, was in
common use in the mid- to late '50s here in the U.S. In a discussion on the
alt.usage.english newsgroup, Joe Fineman (Caltech class of '58) reproduced
this journal entry he wrote in 1956, in a section on the language of
Caltech students:

SPAZ, n.R (shortened from _spastic_) 1. _Obsolete._ A person lacking in the
common social skills & virtues. See TWITCH. 2.
To surprise a person in a way that causes him to take some time to react.
v.R

(The "R" means "regional or national" — i.e., I was aware at the time that
this was not just Caltech slang. The noun was, of course, obsolete only at
Caltech, where it had been replaced by the allusive "twitch".)

The term may have already been on its way out at Caltech, but both the noun
and verb were catching on in various parts of the country in the late '50s.
The earliest print reference cited by the OED is actually for the verb,
even though the noun form must have come first:

1957 Hammond (Indiana) Times 6 Nov. B2/6 Jewelers, furriers, and furniture
dealers go through similar merchandising tortures whenever Wall Street
spazzes.
---[end excerpt]---

Link to Joe Fineman's alt.usage.english post:

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.usage.english/c/Vot_tWlv4LA/m/jIzcq4h47b0J

...which I shared here back in 2005 (and is now included in the Green's
Dictionary of Slang entry):

https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2005-June/051326.html
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/5mhfosq

At the time, the OED had just added an entry for "spaz" as a verb (defined
as "to lose physical or emotional control, usually as the result of an
intense emotional experience; to act in a bizarre or uncharacteristic
way"), with the 1957 cite above. Looking in the databases now, I see an
antedating for the verb, taking it back another year:

---
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/103753933/spaz/
Hartford Courant, Oct. 22, 1956, p. 15, col. 1
"We were a little spasmodic, but when we didn't 'spaz' we looked very
good," the coach laughed.
[quoting Yale football coach Jordan Olivar]
---

It still seems likely that the noun predated the verb, but I haven't found
examples for the noun earlier than Joe Fineman's diary entry, also from
'56. (OED's earliest for the noun is from 1965, from Pauline Kael's _I Lost
it at the Movies_.) "Spazz" appears in Dr. Seuss's _On Beyond Zebra_ (1955)
as a fanciful letter of the alphabet (used to spell the name of a beast
called "Spazzim"), but that doesn't seem relevant.

--bgz

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