Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Slang’

I once witnessed a scene on a Philadelphia street corner that went something like this:

SEATED MIDDLE-AGED BLACK DUDE

(while looking at a girl over his shoulder and talking to another guy)

That girlfriend of yours, man: She’s. A. Fine. Ass. Woman. Mm. Mm. Mm.

MMMM.

No disrespect.

The crazy part is that I could see the other guy’s rage visibly increase as the black dude carried on like that about his girl and, then, evaporate just as quickly as as soon as he heard the “no disrespect.” It was an incredible sight. And I immediately recognized it for what it was: a powerful incantation for de-balling an angry fist. It was like a thin British girl, in the prime of her fertility, stopping a hoard of horny pirates dead in their tracks by simply saying “parley.” Or like placing a disclaimer at the bottom of your illegal copy of a movie like this:

None taken.

What I didn’t know was whether anyone could use the line, or if it only worked coming out of a middle-aged black dude’s mouth. I also didn’t know if it worked equally as good if you prefaced your potentially offensive statement with it (as in, “no disrespect, but you can’t sing”) or if you had to say it at the end, to clear the air after-the-fact. Worse, there was no way to test it until I got into some hot water—and, by then, it could be too late.

After years of experiments, I’m here to tell you that the line is solid gold—especially with ghetto-ish ladies, hostile ethnic types, and power-tripping authority figures. But it’s all in the delivery.

So use it and abuse it to get yourself out of jams. But if you get a beat down, it’s because you—no disrespect—fucked it up.

A lot of bad-ass shit that starts on the mean streets of the ethnic world, dies a slow death in the suburban cul-de-sacs of the mainstream. By the time young-ish white girls start doing it, you know the fangs on the tiger have been filed down to rounded nubs. Then, one day, you hear it coming out of a middle-aged lady’s mouth on an idiotic sitcom and you know it’s all over.

I’ve seen this process repeated with Swiss-clockwork precision on tons of urban, ethnic (often black) language and practices including: Snoop Dogg lingo (fo’ shizzle),” talk to the hand,” “no they didn’t,” the raise the roof palms-up gesture, the cabbage patch dance, corn rows, etc.

A recent casualty to this trend has been the distended-lip, kissy face pioneered by Latino men all over the world to discretely point to things without using their hands or, similarly, by black men to express intrigue or curiosity.

Cuba Gooding demonstrates his intrigue and curiosity.

But a deadly cocktail of digital cameras, picture texts, and social networking has rendered the once-useful gesture into the over-abused, default pose for lame self portraits (accompanied by the raised, extended arm toward the camera) or a generic, catch-all “cutesy” face for party-atmosphere group shots.

Aw, djeah, boy-ee. Don't be frontin'. Keep it real, like me.

So, it’s with great regret that I bid goodbye to the mighty kissy face. For decades, you served us well, my old friend.