On Language: Back in the Day
By William Safire - New York Times
Sphere: Related Content“A couple of expressions keep popping up in classrooms all over,” says Karen Tolchin, assistant professor of English at Florida Gulf Coast University, “looking back to what they think of as a previous era, which to us was not very long ago. One is back in the day — as in, ‘back in the day when I had the old iPod.’ The other is ‘I like to kick it old school,’ meaning they like the ‘classics’ — songs or books or films of only a few years ago. This imbues old expressions with what seems to us a wholly different time sense.”
Professor Tolchin is an expert in what the Germans call Bildungsromane, novels about the pangs of characters growing up, from Goethe’s young Werther to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to Roth’s Alexander Portnoy. Her book, “Part Blood, Part Ketchup: Coming of Age in American Literature and Film,” has sensitized her to the time warps in teen slang, which has been much influenced by the hip-hop culture.
Culture? Especially after the Imus Affair, which sparked universal revulsion at the defamation (it’s best to avoid “denigration” in this context) of black women in hip-hop lyrics as “bitches” and “hos,” how can this fast-talking — and for many of us, hard-to-understand — patois be called a culture?
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May 24th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Yo, man, back in the day me and my girls, we just showed up to grade school representin and fly and shit right, right? Well the pig in the suit calls us into the office and starts asking us if we’re wearin our rags backwards and shit cuz we’re foolin’ round with those whack gangs starting up over in Parsons, and we’re all like, nigga chill, we just representin fo Kris Kross, y’all.
True story, except for using the “n” word when addressing our fat Baptist minister of a principal ;)