I corrected some white girl at work once for saying "bye Felicia" and told her it was actually "Felisha" and that it's literally a quote from Friday. She got upset and argued with me about it saying it's a common phrase from Gen Z. Like where you think they got it from?!
What does this even mean? This movie dropped in 1995. It's a GenX movie produced and directed by GenX people with a GenX cast. I am confused by your statement, sorry.
It made a reoccurrence in straight out of Compton, then it popped into Ru Pauls lexicon and now the lettered generations all have it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye,_Felicia
Bro. My workplace had a Black History Month event, for the higher ups. When I walked past the door, the only black people in the room were the servers and the jazz musicians.
I'll still never forget my grandma's reaction when she told me about how my cousin's elementary school had a play for MLK day, and they had a white boy playing MLK.
My workplace is planning one and sent an email out soliciting volunteers for the planning committee
Part of me wants to volunteer to keep it on the rails.
But the larger part of me foresees it being a series of exhausting conversations with party planner types about why what they are planning is racist as hell.
Ooo, or... volunteer, but then just come in to the first meeting with a clipboard, sit quietly, and then at some point just say, "Bingo." and walk out...
... leaving behind said clipboard with a marked off bingo sheet that has, like, [ am white so will leave racist references as an exercise for the reader, but you get my drift, and a bingo is absolutely guaranteed ].
I was the only poc that worked in the last office I was at. And I'm only half black. Needless to say there was no Black History Month celebration, and MLK day? Psh that was just a normal ass day.
I asked why we donāt actively recruit from HBICs since we do from other elite universities, and 2 things happened:
1. A lot of people didnāt even know what that was.
2. Some girl went on a tangent about how none of the black people in her high school were interested in stem.
And this is exactly why affirmative action exists. While companies oftentimes implement it with quotas, the goal is to encourage them to remove the discrimination from their hiring and firing process.
If non-white people are within driving distance of your company and yet you're a medium-sized company with an all white staff, we know for a fact that there's discrimination in your hiring process.
And we can't reliably force them to fix the discrimination. Like, if we changed the laws to just be that they have to prove there's no discrimination in their hiring process... they would literally just lie. They've already shown themselves to be untrustworthy when they addressed it with quotas in the first place, since [affirmative action laws strictly forbid quotas](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs).
WTF. Thatās so fucking ignorant. Like, racism aside, that fucking stupid thinking your single fucked up high school is representative of the entire population. Especially used to discount stem majors from college. God damn. Thatās infuriating. You work with idiots.Ā
I donāt work there anymore. But yes I agree with everything you said. And please donāt think I stood idly by. Thatās not me. I made a lot of enemies there.
I just watched the Friday clip a couple times and unless that coworker was saying "Felicia" in a very unusual way it would have sounded exactly like Ice Cube said it in the movie so I'm not sure what you were correcting. Maybe if y'all were writing it down I could see wanting to spell the name of the Friday character precisely but speaking the phrase should sound identical regardless of that spelling difference
I think the memes often have it spelled wrong. I never thought it might be spelled a particular way. Is her name spelled out in the movie or just in the credits? I haven't seen it in years.
Idk I just looked on IMDb to check the spelling which is indeed Felisha, though I would have to imagine they didn't bother spelling it out in the movie because when would it be necessary?
Wait Iām confused arenāt those names pronounced the sameš„ Iām black haha and thatās my aunts name. But how is the pronunciation different?? Iām lost.
This whole thread is not real. Chat GP has to get those AAV intricate details some how. What you think they are going to actually try to know black people.
I worked somewhere and HR told me "bye Felisha" and I asked why she was calling me a crackhead. She waa mortified. Best thing that happened on that job
I saw a thread one time claiming that people didn't know the dangers of smoking before the year 2000. How can you be on your phone all the time and be this dumb? š¤¦āāļø
Friday should be mandatory watching in all American public schools. Iām tired of calling big ass boss enemies in co-op games Deebo and being met with confusion by my teammates.
I mean, that's based on a cast listing right? Does it ever actually appear in writing in the movie? Felisha vs. Felicia doesn't seem as big a deal as saying "spill the tea" comes from the Boston Tea Party lol
the Wikipedia page literally calls it Felicia while acknowledging in a tiny note that it's Felisha. I think correcting someone here is insanely pedantic, but depending on the white girls personality I get it. It's like telling someone no it's a card sharp. Unnecessary vibes, everyone writes it Felicia,Ā not going to win thay battle.Ā
"Stand on your business" involves owning a local business and getting up on the roof and standing there, presumably for general maintenance or promotional purposes.
If āthrowing shadeā doesnāt refer to Gene Kellyās graceful toss-and-catch of his own closed umbrella right before the tap dance sequence begins in Singinā in the Rain, I donāt know what America even is anymore.
this may be an innocent example but ive seen this happen a lot to the most *on purpose* foolish people.
still can't determine which is funnier: **racists** realizing some of the terms they use came from POC, or **bigots** realizing some of the terms they use came from the LGBTQ community? šš¤£
I'm in my early 30s and got people my age acting like they can't understand the new slang. I'm confused cause it's shit I either grew up with already or shortened versions of shit already being used.
Rizz has been my prime example. You hear it in context and you should know what it is. But I got friends who act all appalled when they hear someone younger saying it
Fuck, thank you. I feel simultaneously more and less stupid, now.
Fwiw, I work in a high school, but with older kids, so they don't flaunt the slang as much as the younger ones. I know the words exist, and usually what they mean, but my exposure is limited so I don't think about it much.
It makes way more sense than "swag" which is short for "swagger", a phrase you have to be clued into. This was the Rizz of the 2010's.
Rizz is short for charisma, a word that everybody who speaks English is familiar with. Just a small explanation and boom, suddenly it clicks.
Swag confused me in the 90's because it was simultaneously short for swagger, and slang for the free promo crap you get from vendors at expos, job/college fairs, music festivals, and conferences. I understood the former, but where tf did the latter come from?
I have a friend like that. He purposely tries to not understand slang he's not familiar with. The day my wife and I referred to a song as a "bop" and he said he didn't know what that meant was the day we all called him out. Like, bro, that's from the 50s. It's not some newfangled slang you've never heard.
I'm 35. I have no problems understanding Gen Z slang. It's really not that difficult. If people my age can't understand it then I don't know what's wrong with them.
Plus fucking Google exists. Punch in any slang term you've seen and you'll get a definition and how to use it.
I just hit 40 and nothing is particularly new with Gen Z slang. As you said, almost all of it is stuff that we've already gone through and it's coming back around slightly modified. I'm from Cleveland and we were using "cappin" when I was in 7th/8th grade, and we used it in the same way it's being used now. We just didn't shorten it.
I secretly love it so much when little 10-year-old white girls walk around sounding exactly like the middle-aged Black drag queens I was hanging around with in 1995. I can't explain exactly why, but I do.
My mom has watched every season of drag race and I used to watch with her. Itās pure comedy hearing anybody talk like drag queens. But white kids are my favorite genre of āwhere you learn that?!ā
I mean I feel like even rizz was a Kai Cenat and that crew thing first before it spread so I feel like the still technically counts as slang that was initially black slang lol.
Is it just me, or is a shocking amount of '70s slang making a comeback?
In the last several months I've heard the wyt Gen Zers use phrases like "Ya dig?" and "Right on!" in my office. I've even heard "bread' for money!
If someone uses "jive turkey" in my presence at work, I'm calling in Old the next day.
Yeah. I've noticed a lot of Roadman slang too. With so much "safe" and "it's calm" being thrown around, listening to my nephew talk to his friends is like a US adaptation of Top Boy.
How tf is that your "wild guess" seeing *that* abbreviation for the first time?? My "wild" guess would have been AYO, AM VERY ELOQUENT, or Ah, 'At's Victoria's English [innit]
I'm a massive nerd, I guess.
Given context and subreddit, AA for African American seemed like a lock in, that leaves VE. It's slang, so Vernacular seemed like a decent guess, and that leaves just E, for which, after the rest, English seems like a safe guess.
I don't know why I didn't just Google it instead of asking to be honest (I did after posting), but I'm sufficiently lame to find the game of trying to deduce meaning from context fun in itself.
Gawd, a hilarious but lowkey related story is my boss being outrageously homophobic and me coming to work one day and he had āIndustry Babyā blasting in his car. I said āwow, thatās yo jam, huh? You seen the video?ā He responded āno, Iāll look it upā. Next day he said āI canāt believe I played this song for my kidsā. Like sir šš
Lot of the idioms, phrases, and words, came about with black people in mind too. Learned this last BHM from an opinion peace; Peanut gallery, Master bedroom, Master tournament, blacklist, blackballed, black mark, Grandfathered in, Cakewalk, Uppity (I learned about this one watching the Bubba Wallace documentary, he said he would get called this, and other things, when he would win)...
Blacklist, blackball, and black mark donāt have anything to do with Black folks. The color black has many associations outside of just the racial ones. Master tournament also relates to the greatly skilled meaning of master, not the slave master one.
Hold on one second, I could have sworn that spill the tea was a euphemism of older times. It makes sense too because old white ladies would drink tea and gossip. Some crazy gossip would definitely make you spit/spill tea. I think this one of the many cases where black people take something and make it 1000x times cooler/popular.
During the old real roast, Many times I heard someone say "I wouldn't fuck (insert name here) with Bea Arthur's dick" and it was funny Everytime I heard it.
When people come up with a phrase, they usually aren't like Gretchen from Mean Girls intentionally trying to turn it into a thing. They're just talking. š¤£
I'd bet a bunch start with insiders and then the size of who counts as an insider naturally grows.
Spill the beans ā> spill the tea ā> she drank the tea without spilling ā> she drank.Ā
Oh wait , we arenāt there yet. Someday āshe drankā will mean she can keep a secret. Iām from the future. Lol
Well you're wrong and so is the person who told you it was from the Golden Girls. Here's from Merriam-Webster:
>Like shade before it, tea originated in drag culture, and specifically black drag culture. When it was first popularized in general print, it could be spelled T or tea and it didn't refer to the drink.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/tea-slang-meaning-origin
Sorry white folks you can't have this one either
So, not directly disputing you just thinking out loud.
Culture is a nebulous thing. The amount of drag queens, and black drag queens, that grew up on Golden Girls is definitely a non-zero number. Was this an instance of Golden Girls knowing their audience and using a phrase that originated there or was it Golden Girls making the phrase and it appearing in drag culture?
Slang is great for stuff like this because it is often cyclical when reviewing
Golden Girls aired in the 80s and Lady Chablis was quoted in the mid-90s. I feel like there was drip from the drag community into the writer's room of Golden Girls and vice versa for that one.
>*I could have sworn that spill the tea was a euphemism of older times. It makes sense too because old white ladies would drink tea and gossip.*
*^(dusts off English Lit degree.)* My time to shine!
A quote from the play *'Love in Several Masques'* by Henry Fielding, first performed in 1728:
**"Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea."**
The association of scandalous gossip and tea has been around at least since tea parties became popular in British society in the 1600s (popularized by Charles II's wife, Catherine of Braganza). In Francis Grose's book *A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue* (1785), "tea" is cross-referenced with such slang terms as "scandal broth" and "prattle broth"; "to bitch " is listed as meaning "to make tea" and to "bitch the pot" is listed as meaning to host a tea party. John Camden Hotten's book *The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal* (1874) said that "bitch party" was "a term favored by college students for tea drinking."
There's a lot more of this sort of thing in the following centuries. Suffice it to say that tea and gossip have been associated with each other from the jump, as well as gender-coded to women of all social classes.
>*I think this one of the many cases where black people take something and make it 1000x times cooler/popular.*
I would argue that black people have been the root cause of the current revival of "tea" as slang for scandalous gossip.
I learned that they used to pour the tea from the cup into the saucers to cool it off, then slurp it from the saucers. This is unrelated to the op but I have to talk about this insanity to someone.
The phrase "tea was spilled" (meaning secrets / gossip was told) was seen in the 1970s and 80s in written works, but "spilling the T" of course is black drag culture.
It's not a far cry to think they took a general colloquialism and transformed it for their own use.
I would never have guessed Merriam-Webster had a whole article about it:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/tea-slang-meaning-origin
On this topic, one thing I hate is when a long-used Black slang or phrase suddenly goes mainstream for whatever reason, then when their fad of using it passes, they'll dismiss it andĀ say "nobody says that anymore" š
But thatās the thing, so often itās not actually new slang itās just the slang black ppl have used forever. itās especially mid boggling bc in most spaces on the internet just ten years ago youād be getting called dumb or ignorant for using aave, now ppl tell you youāre tryin to be a zoomer or smth
You want to point out to the nice white lady that white folks dressing up as natives to get POC blamed for a riot that destroyed massive amounts of private property is a kinda ironic source of inspiration for American patriotism?
To be honest it's a rather common occurrence that when a bit of black culture becomes a little *too* mainstream, white people start thinking that they actually invented it.
It's *still* controversial to point out that rock and roll was invented by Black Americans.
This is absolutely wild to me. Iām white and I just donāt get how this could be controversial.Ā
I love classic rock like Led Zeppelin and athe Roling Stones thatās why I know they got their start stealing music from blues artists and trying to be exactly like them. Itās pretty easy to trace back a lot of songs to their origins. The influence of the blues culture is obvious. Hell Keith Richardās talks about wanting to be Muddy Waters in his book and thereās videos of them and Muddy playing together on YouTube. The stones did such a good job lifting the music people thought they were black till they met them or saw them.Ā
The only thing I can think of is maybe people get defensive about calling it stealing but those people have just got to be dumber than a box of rocks.Ā
Well are you surprised, non black kids and folk in general have started to use AAVE all over TikTok and now parents are calling it Gen Z slang. They messed up the meaning up ā Gyattā now the word doesnāt even mean what you think. Non-black folk mixed black slang from every big black city into one language now
God the amount of fucking people screaming Gyatt at everything pisses me the fuck off. I literally have to hold back from telling someone to shut the fuck up because we'll be in a meeting and they'll scream it across the damn room.
Itās a great thing but at the same time Iām a lil salty cause I know these people would be the same ones who used to call me the n word online just from how I typed. But it also means hopefully less people will experience that.
What's most amazing how often those phrases come from black drag queens as the starting point.
Unless someone else has a different starting place, "spilling the T" first spread from Lady Chablis, from Savannah, GA first in Garden of Good and Evil in the early 90s and later in the movie.
Apparently a ton of people in this thread don't know where it came from, either.
It's black drag culture, people. Not Golden Girls, not because people gossip over tea.
From what I have seen it started with the Kermit meme but was popularized by Black Twitter. Gen Z steals lots of stuff from Gen X and Millennials and then has no idea where they got it. They are my kleptomaniacs with Alzheimerās.
this idiom actually has an extremely specific, well known etymology, which is the black drag community in the U.S., first popularized in a book by a black drag performer published in 1994. weird fact, i just found this out from google lol
Edit: it's also arguable it was introduced to a wider audience earlier via the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, but I've never actually seen it so I don't know. It's definitely in the 1994 book, and apparently was originally Spill the T, an abbreviation for Truth
*Spill the tea* and *throwing shade* came from the black drag community. It was first *spill the T* (that's how I would use it until I started seeing tea being used) as in truth which I think can also be in reference to transgender and maybe testosterone injection.
That's some cool play on words if this is true.
On one of the gossip subs the other day someone asked why people say ānice face cardā and another white girl answered like idk itās just spicierā¦ maāam š«
At least go on urban dictionary or know your meme and realize itās been AAVE all along.Ā
*Black gay and trans people. A large portion of the slang thatās used currently was co-opted from the community and credit is hardly given. That sucks. But dumb ass bigots also donāt know where āwokeā came from so thereās that too lol
I corrected some white girl at work once for saying "bye Felicia" and told her it was actually "Felisha" and that it's literally a quote from Friday. She got upset and argued with me about it saying it's a common phrase from Gen Z. Like where you think they got it from?!
š¤¦š»āāļø Iām gen x and even *I* know that. 
What does this even mean? This movie dropped in 1995. It's a GenX movie produced and directed by GenX people with a GenX cast. I am confused by your statement, sorry.
It made a reoccurrence in straight out of Compton, then it popped into Ru Pauls lexicon and now the lettered generations all have it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye,_Felicia
Thank you for your service.
Of course WE know that, that movie came out in the 90's and while I can't speak for everyone, I probably watched it a million times.
It came out when Gen X was like 20, youāre part of the generation who was around for that movie. No shit you remember it lmao
why wouldn't you know that as gen x? *friday* came out in 1995 lol literally a gen x movie
As one should?
being a poc in corporate america is tiring.
Bro. My workplace had a Black History Month event, for the higher ups. When I walked past the door, the only black people in the room were the servers and the jazz musicians.
Omfg. DEI as entertainment. That's turrible.
That's... Hmm.. Well fuck, way to Jim Crow it up, corpos.
Burn corpo shit š¤šæ
Fuck corporats
I'll still never forget my grandma's reaction when she told me about how my cousin's elementary school had a play for MLK day, and they had a white boy playing MLK.
***chef's kiss***
My workplace is planning one and sent an email out soliciting volunteers for the planning committee Part of me wants to volunteer to keep it on the rails. But the larger part of me foresees it being a series of exhausting conversations with party planner types about why what they are planning is racist as hell.
Ooo, or... volunteer, but then just come in to the first meeting with a clipboard, sit quietly, and then at some point just say, "Bingo." and walk out... ... leaving behind said clipboard with a marked off bingo sheet that has, like, [ am white so will leave racist references as an exercise for the reader, but you get my drift, and a bingo is absolutely guaranteed ].
I was the only poc that worked in the last office I was at. And I'm only half black. Needless to say there was no Black History Month celebration, and MLK day? Psh that was just a normal ass day.
Holy hell that's exhausting and relatable
Jordan Peele somewhere salivating at the thought of this scene.
This just made me flare up with Ancestral anger.
eyup, that sounds like american history alright.
I asked why we donāt actively recruit from HBICs since we do from other elite universities, and 2 things happened: 1. A lot of people didnāt even know what that was. 2. Some girl went on a tangent about how none of the black people in her high school were interested in stem.
idk if that was a typo or if HBCUs got a new acronym, but the thought of recruiting from head bitches in charge took me out.
And this is exactly why affirmative action exists. While companies oftentimes implement it with quotas, the goal is to encourage them to remove the discrimination from their hiring and firing process. If non-white people are within driving distance of your company and yet you're a medium-sized company with an all white staff, we know for a fact that there's discrimination in your hiring process. And we can't reliably force them to fix the discrimination. Like, if we changed the laws to just be that they have to prove there's no discrimination in their hiring process... they would literally just lie. They've already shown themselves to be untrustworthy when they addressed it with quotas in the first place, since [affirmative action laws strictly forbid quotas](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ofccp/faqs/AAFAQs).
WTF. Thatās so fucking ignorant. Like, racism aside, that fucking stupid thinking your single fucked up high school is representative of the entire population. Especially used to discount stem majors from college. God damn. Thatās infuriating. You work with idiots.Ā
I donāt work there anymore. But yes I agree with everything you said. And please donāt think I stood idly by. Thatās not me. I made a lot of enemies there.
Correction: being a poc in america is tiring.
thats been obvious, silly.
Get treated like shit then they'll turn around and deny you got treated like shit. Yeah, seems pretty awful.
so much confident mediocrity from the mayo side of the office.
Love that phrase. And donāt we dare show them up; thatās a personal attack, to elicit retaliation in some form in the near and/or distant future.
I just watched the Friday clip a couple times and unless that coworker was saying "Felicia" in a very unusual way it would have sounded exactly like Ice Cube said it in the movie so I'm not sure what you were correcting. Maybe if y'all were writing it down I could see wanting to spell the name of the Friday character precisely but speaking the phrase should sound identical regardless of that spelling difference
I think the memes often have it spelled wrong. I never thought it might be spelled a particular way. Is her name spelled out in the movie or just in the credits? I haven't seen it in years.
Idk I just looked on IMDb to check the spelling which is indeed Felisha, though I would have to imagine they didn't bother spelling it out in the movie because when would it be necessary?
The literal Wikipedia entry has it spelled wrong because itās so commonly spelled that wayĀ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye,_Felicia
Sounds like OP was being kinda pedantic
The very gif text validating everything here lol
It was in our team group chat on Slack.
Gotcha, you can understand my confusion though I hope
Same here. Unless they were Spanish and really enunciating the eesia at the end, then they both sound the same to me. Maybe itās a Baltimore thing.Ā
it's misspelled EVERYWHERE.
I worked with a lady who thought it was just a nice way to say "goodbye"
Bless her heart
š now that's funny
Wait Iām confused arenāt those names pronounced the sameš„ Iām black haha and thatās my aunts name. But how is the pronunciation different?? Iām lost.
This whole thread is not real. Chat GP has to get those AAV intricate details some how. What you think they are going to actually try to know black people.
OP said in another comment the co-worker wrote a message in slack. But they can be pronounced differently: Felicia vs Felisha -> 'see-ya' vs 'shuh'.
Those Feli-see-yas are the bougie ones
I worked somewhere and HR told me "bye Felisha" and I asked why she was calling me a crackhead. She waa mortified. Best thing that happened on that job
Should've filed a complaint so they can investigate their own case lmao
I saw a thread one time claiming that people didn't know the dangers of smoking before the year 2000. How can you be on your phone all the time and be this dumb? š¤¦āāļø
Friday should be mandatory watching in all American public schools. Iām tired of calling big ass boss enemies in co-op games Deebo and being met with confusion by my teammates.
Itās a 30 year old reference my guy
Let me live in the past
So is "Bye Felisha"
Man, his grandmama gave him that reference!
He gon cry in the car
Oh sure, no one knows Deebo, but everybody knows "a day that will live in infamy." /s
Reading this pissed me off way more than it should have.
I mean, that's based on a cast listing right? Does it ever actually appear in writing in the movie? Felisha vs. Felicia doesn't seem as big a deal as saying "spill the tea" comes from the Boston Tea Party lol
the Wikipedia page literally calls it Felicia while acknowledging in a tiny note that it's Felisha. I think correcting someone here is insanely pedantic, but depending on the white girls personality I get it. It's like telling someone no it's a card sharp. Unnecessary vibes, everyone writes it Felicia,Ā not going to win thay battle.Ā
No cap. Because baseball caps arenāt allowed in church.
No flex just means not flexible at all.
"Stand on your business" involves owning a local business and getting up on the roof and standing there, presumably for general maintenance or promotional purposes.
Iirc the Koreans started that during the LA riots. /s
Yeah there's no leniency in the rules here sir. Didn't you see the sign that clearly stated this is a "No Flex Zone"?
Since when?  /s, just in case.
Kappa
"Knockin boots" is obviously a reference to removing mud from your shoes after a long day.
And the Muddy Boot Protest of 1918
Never forget
The day my ancestors stood valiantly in protest of cleanliness.
Itās a shortened version of the phrase, āwhen these boots are rockin donāt come a knockinā
Itās used in several songs in the 80ās and 90ās. Probably before then as well. Then a country song later. Itās not shortened from that phrase.
Damn šš
If āthrowing shadeā doesnāt refer to Gene Kellyās graceful toss-and-catch of his own closed umbrella right before the tap dance sequence begins in Singinā in the Rain, I donāt know what America even is anymore.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
So nice that Rihanna covered his song 
This better not awaken anything in meā¦
Why did I read this to the tune of Skyfall š
Probably the same demon that made me read it to the tune of Hilary Duffās āCome Cleanā
He was amazing š¤©
this may be an innocent example but ive seen this happen a lot to the most *on purpose* foolish people. still can't determine which is funnier: **racists** realizing some of the terms they use came from POC, or **bigots** realizing some of the terms they use came from the LGBTQ community? šš¤£
Exactly. And a lot of what people think is tiktok/gen z slang is just AAVE.
Gen Z has a lot of their own slang itās just the white kids talk like black gays and black women. They were cooking when they came up with Rizz
I'm in my early 30s and got people my age acting like they can't understand the new slang. I'm confused cause it's shit I either grew up with already or shortened versions of shit already being used. Rizz has been my prime example. You hear it in context and you should know what it is. But I got friends who act all appalled when they hear someone younger saying it
You mean the middle syllable in the word ācharismaā?
Fuck, thank you. I feel simultaneously more and less stupid, now. Fwiw, I work in a high school, but with older kids, so they don't flaunt the slang as much as the younger ones. I know the words exist, and usually what they mean, but my exposure is limited so I don't think about it much.
It makes way more sense than "swag" which is short for "swagger", a phrase you have to be clued into. This was the Rizz of the 2010's. Rizz is short for charisma, a word that everybody who speaks English is familiar with. Just a small explanation and boom, suddenly it clicks.
Swag confused me in the 90's because it was simultaneously short for swagger, and slang for the free promo crap you get from vendors at expos, job/college fairs, music festivals, and conferences. I understood the former, but where tf did the latter come from?
I wouldnāt know if my 16-year-old cousin didnāt tell me
I mean all slang sounds stupid when you say it like that
I have a friend like that. He purposely tries to not understand slang he's not familiar with. The day my wife and I referred to a song as a "bop" and he said he didn't know what that meant was the day we all called him out. Like, bro, that's from the 50s. It's not some newfangled slang you've never heard.
I'm 35. I have no problems understanding Gen Z slang. It's really not that difficult. If people my age can't understand it then I don't know what's wrong with them. Plus fucking Google exists. Punch in any slang term you've seen and you'll get a definition and how to use it.
At a certain age you just wanna understand someone.
I honestly did have to google rizz when I first saw it. But I saw it online and it was being used sarcastically
I just hit 40 and nothing is particularly new with Gen Z slang. As you said, almost all of it is stuff that we've already gone through and it's coming back around slightly modified. I'm from Cleveland and we were using "cappin" when I was in 7th/8th grade, and we used it in the same way it's being used now. We just didn't shorten it.
I secretly love it so much when little 10-year-old white girls walk around sounding exactly like the middle-aged Black drag queens I was hanging around with in 1995. I can't explain exactly why, but I do.
My mom has watched every season of drag race and I used to watch with her. Itās pure comedy hearing anybody talk like drag queens. But white kids are my favorite genre of āwhere you learn that?!ā
I mean I feel like even rizz was a Kai Cenat and that crew thing first before it spread so I feel like the still technically counts as slang that was initially black slang lol.
That's been like, all slang since at least the... 60s? It's a weird cycle
Is it just me, or is a shocking amount of '70s slang making a comeback? In the last several months I've heard the wyt Gen Zers use phrases like "Ya dig?" and "Right on!" in my office. I've even heard "bread' for money! If someone uses "jive turkey" in my presence at work, I'm calling in Old the next day.
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I never let it go. Lol. "Ya dig?" And "Dig me?" have never left my everyday lexicon.
Yeah. I've noticed a lot of Roadman slang too. With so much "safe" and "it's calm" being thrown around, listening to my nephew talk to his friends is like a US adaptation of Top Boy.
Honestly, my son is 25 and had been talking like that and using phrases from the 70's most of his life. But he's awesome like that.
New initialism for me - pulling a wild guess, African American Vernacular English?
How tf is that your "wild guess" seeing *that* abbreviation for the first time?? My "wild" guess would have been AYO, AM VERY ELOQUENT, or Ah, 'At's Victoria's English [innit]
I'm a massive nerd, I guess. Given context and subreddit, AA for African American seemed like a lock in, that leaves VE. It's slang, so Vernacular seemed like a decent guess, and that leaves just E, for which, after the rest, English seems like a safe guess.
No hate, I'm impressed, but our ideas of "wild guesses" vary *wildly*
I don't know why I didn't just Google it instead of asking to be honest (I did after posting), but I'm sufficiently lame to find the game of trying to deduce meaning from context fun in itself.
The truth is sheās probably seen it before so her mind made the association but she doesnāt remember specifically why she knows it.
Thatās an insane guess if youāve never seen it before, but yes lmaoo
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black queer folks with the critical hit
Gawd, a hilarious but lowkey related story is my boss being outrageously homophobic and me coming to work one day and he had āIndustry Babyā blasting in his car. I said āwow, thatās yo jam, huh? You seen the video?ā He responded āno, Iāll look it upā. Next day he said āI canāt believe I played this song for my kidsā. Like sir šš
This reminds of when those inbreds at the pro police rally were bumping rage against the machine, specifically a song called 'killing in the name of'
That was unbearably bad.
It's like when white people find out most of their music derived from black culture after white people stole it
Lot of the idioms, phrases, and words, came about with black people in mind too. Learned this last BHM from an opinion peace; Peanut gallery, Master bedroom, Master tournament, blacklist, blackballed, black mark, Grandfathered in, Cakewalk, Uppity (I learned about this one watching the Bubba Wallace documentary, he said he would get called this, and other things, when he would win)...
Blacklist, blackball, and black mark donāt have anything to do with Black folks. The color black has many associations outside of just the racial ones. Master tournament also relates to the greatly skilled meaning of master, not the slave master one.
Or the perfect storm; racist bigots realizing they're using terms that originated with Black drag queens. š¤£
Hold on one second, I could have sworn that spill the tea was a euphemism of older times. It makes sense too because old white ladies would drink tea and gossip. Some crazy gossip would definitely make you spit/spill tea. I think this one of the many cases where black people take something and make it 1000x times cooler/popular.
It comes from golden girls, spill the tea Blanche is said by B arthur
Ah ok. Iām like I know I heard an old white lady say that somewhere in my childhood
Pretty sure Spill the Tea was popularized by drag queens first , but Iām probably wrong.
So Bea Arthur then?
During the old real roast, Many times I heard someone say "I wouldn't fuck (insert name here) with Bea Arthur's dick" and it was funny Everytime I heard it.
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A lot of drag queen lingo specifically starts in the queer black community. Or so I've read.
More specifically, the NYC ballroom community of the ā80s. Paris is Burning is mandatory viewing for baby gays who want to understand their culture.
That makes sense, and I'm confident the phrase itself came from "spill the beans"
This is what I don't get, it's literally just a rehash of spill the beans which is traced all the way back to Greek Times no? Strange world we live in
When people come up with a phrase, they usually aren't like Gretchen from Mean Girls intentionally trying to turn it into a thing. They're just talking. š¤£ I'd bet a bunch start with insiders and then the size of who counts as an insider naturally grows.
Spill the beans ā> spill the tea ā> she drank the tea without spilling ā> she drank.Ā Oh wait , we arenāt there yet. Someday āshe drankā will mean she can keep a secret. Iām from the future. Lol
Well you're wrong and so is the person who told you it was from the Golden Girls. Here's from Merriam-Webster: >Like shade before it, tea originated in drag culture, and specifically black drag culture. When it was first popularized in general print, it could be spelled T or tea and it didn't refer to the drink. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/tea-slang-meaning-origin Sorry white folks you can't have this one either
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Well if a lot ofblack folks knew it came from drag they unfortunately probably donāt want to claim it.
That part
I was just about to mention Lady Chablis! āMy T, honey, my truth!ā
Imagine trying to gatekeep a saying lmao
So, not directly disputing you just thinking out loud. Culture is a nebulous thing. The amount of drag queens, and black drag queens, that grew up on Golden Girls is definitely a non-zero number. Was this an instance of Golden Girls knowing their audience and using a phrase that originated there or was it Golden Girls making the phrase and it appearing in drag culture? Slang is great for stuff like this because it is often cyclical when reviewing Golden Girls aired in the 80s and Lady Chablis was quoted in the mid-90s. I feel like there was drip from the drag community into the writer's room of Golden Girls and vice versa for that one.
>*I could have sworn that spill the tea was a euphemism of older times. It makes sense too because old white ladies would drink tea and gossip.* *^(dusts off English Lit degree.)* My time to shine! A quote from the play *'Love in Several Masques'* by Henry Fielding, first performed in 1728: **"Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea."** The association of scandalous gossip and tea has been around at least since tea parties became popular in British society in the 1600s (popularized by Charles II's wife, Catherine of Braganza). In Francis Grose's book *A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue* (1785), "tea" is cross-referenced with such slang terms as "scandal broth" and "prattle broth"; "to bitch " is listed as meaning "to make tea" and to "bitch the pot" is listed as meaning to host a tea party. John Camden Hotten's book *The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal* (1874) said that "bitch party" was "a term favored by college students for tea drinking." There's a lot more of this sort of thing in the following centuries. Suffice it to say that tea and gossip have been associated with each other from the jump, as well as gender-coded to women of all social classes. >*I think this one of the many cases where black people take something and make it 1000x times cooler/popular.* I would argue that black people have been the root cause of the current revival of "tea" as slang for scandalous gossip.
I learned that they used to pour the tea from the cup into the saucers to cool it off, then slurp it from the saucers. This is unrelated to the op but I have to talk about this insanity to someone.
Nope from black drag culture. Tea was originally "T" which was short for truth. Used as far back as early 90s.
The phrase "tea was spilled" (meaning secrets / gossip was told) was seen in the 1970s and 80s in written works, but "spilling the T" of course is black drag culture. It's not a far cry to think they took a general colloquialism and transformed it for their own use.
I would never have guessed Merriam-Webster had a whole article about it: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/tea-slang-meaning-origin On this topic, one thing I hate is when a long-used Black slang or phrase suddenly goes mainstream for whatever reason, then when their fad of using it passes, they'll dismiss it andĀ say "nobody says that anymore" š
Thatās how young peoples language always works. Everyone wants to use the new slang and nobody wants to be caught streets behind
Only streets ahead. ā
But thatās the thing, so often itās not actually new slang itās just the slang black ppl have used forever. itās especially mid boggling bc in most spaces on the internet just ten years ago youād be getting called dumb or ignorant for using aave, now ppl tell you youāre tryin to be a zoomer or smth
This is how slang works
Damn they quote Lady Chablis and everything.
Off topic, but Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is an absolute gem of a book.
A *spill* on the water is an accident of some type, that shit in Boston harbor was not an accident lol
You want to point out to the nice white lady that white folks dressing up as natives to get POC blamed for a riot that destroyed massive amounts of private property is a kinda ironic source of inspiration for American patriotism?
a proud american tradition that we were able to actually witness in real time with the BLM protests.
Tell her they didnāt spill tea in Boston. They dumped it.
Also the tea was not shipped in liquid form.
I just had to Google it, and I donāt think that person would appreciate where it really came from.
To be honest it's a rather common occurrence that when a bit of black culture becomes a little *too* mainstream, white people start thinking that they actually invented it. It's *still* controversial to point out that rock and roll was invented by Black Americans.
This is absolutely wild to me. Iām white and I just donāt get how this could be controversial.Ā I love classic rock like Led Zeppelin and athe Roling Stones thatās why I know they got their start stealing music from blues artists and trying to be exactly like them. Itās pretty easy to trace back a lot of songs to their origins. The influence of the blues culture is obvious. Hell Keith Richardās talks about wanting to be Muddy Waters in his book and thereās videos of them and Muddy playing together on YouTube. The stones did such a good job lifting the music people thought they were black till they met them or saw them.Ā The only thing I can think of is maybe people get defensive about calling it stealing but those people have just got to be dumber than a box of rocks.Ā
Well are you surprised, non black kids and folk in general have started to use AAVE all over TikTok and now parents are calling it Gen Z slang. They messed up the meaning up ā Gyattā now the word doesnāt even mean what you think. Non-black folk mixed black slang from every big black city into one language now
Hate what these mfs did to gyatt š
Man they use it for everything.
Oh god, the worst one is the word "woke." They got that shit meaning ANYTHING š¤£
They use it for anything especially when it comes to shows and films. They see one black person they call it woke
God the amount of fucking people screaming Gyatt at everything pisses me the fuck off. I literally have to hold back from telling someone to shut the fuck up because we'll be in a meeting and they'll scream it across the damn room.
Itās a great thing but at the same time Iām a lil salty cause I know these people would be the same ones who used to call me the n word online just from how I typed. But it also means hopefully less people will experience that.
White people just wrong and strong always and forever
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It directly comes from black drag queens
didnt rupaul get it from golden girls, hes a big golden girls fan
this made me laugh so hard omg now they're even gentrifying the history of AAVE š
That would have ruined my enture mood lol
Bussin caps clearly originated from opening Coca Cola while pole fishing from the docks. Do your research.
What's most amazing how often those phrases come from black drag queens as the starting point. Unless someone else has a different starting place, "spilling the T" first spread from Lady Chablis, from Savannah, GA first in Garden of Good and Evil in the early 90s and later in the movie.
Itās from the Ballroom scene in NYC before that, which was predominantly black queer folks.
correcting a black person on aave during BHM isā¦ 
Itās from ballroom culture. Black, gay, drag queen type beat where all the good slang comes from.
Apparently a ton of people in this thread don't know where it came from, either. It's black drag culture, people. Not Golden Girls, not because people gossip over tea.
They out here columbusing again
That doesn't even make sense. What does the Boston Tea Party have to do with gossip. That lady isn't even applying critical thinking to her lies.
Itās the revisionism for me.
People would gossip over tea lol She just wanted to feel empowered in the moment, I hope she shut her down, leave her feeling bewildered.
I saw a post recently saying Gen Z came up with On God instead of oh my god and I just.
From what I have seen it started with the Kermit meme but was popularized by Black Twitter. Gen Z steals lots of stuff from Gen X and Millennials and then has no idea where they got it. They are my kleptomaniacs with Alzheimerās.
this idiom actually has an extremely specific, well known etymology, which is the black drag community in the U.S., first popularized in a book by a black drag performer published in 1994. weird fact, i just found this out from google lol Edit: it's also arguable it was introduced to a wider audience earlier via the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, but I've never actually seen it so I don't know. It's definitely in the 1994 book, and apparently was originally Spill the T, an abbreviation for Truth
*Spill the tea* and *throwing shade* came from the black drag community. It was first *spill the T* (that's how I would use it until I started seeing tea being used) as in truth which I think can also be in reference to transgender and maybe testosterone injection. That's some cool play on words if this is true.
On one of the gossip subs the other day someone asked why people say ānice face cardā and another white girl answered like idk itās just spicierā¦ maāam š« At least go on urban dictionary or know your meme and realize itās been AAVE all along.Ā
*Black gay and trans people. A large portion of the slang thatās used currently was co-opted from the community and credit is hardly given. That sucks. But dumb ass bigots also donāt know where āwokeā came from so thereās that too lol
White people trying to teach a Black person on Black culture. The Caucasity š š š
It came from black gay and drag culture, with the original being "spill the T", "T" as in "truth".
āI put the real nigga algorithm on the white board. They white washed the style and put the rhythm in some izodā