Quantcast
Channel: America – The Montana Post
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Black Slang? Urban America Leaves Us Behind Again

0
0

So I saw an interesting post on Mother Jones, about The word in question is “Holler”, and it being a word with black origins.

Now, having been at college recently, I put too much importance on language, like a good college student. I thought of my own family’s use of the word “holler”. I can definitely trace it back to my grandmother, who likes to say things like “if anything’s wrong, just holler.” Now, my grandmother is not black, but she is from Oklahoma. And I’d be willing to bet that the current hip use of ‘Holler’ (or ‘holla”) stems from usage by black people who also left Oklahoma, only they migrated to Chicago and New York, not Baker Montana (and those white people who did go to Chicago and New York had an easy time mixing with the white people already there, thus dropping ‘holler’, ‘y’all’, and other elements of their vocab identity).

And fifty years later, the urban world rediscovers the word ‘holler’ through its use in black popular culture and decides this is a black word. And they have a debate with 60 comments about it, because they never bothered to look beyond the edges of the suburbs to notice a word that has been in continuous usage for god knows how long.

Short story is: Liberals on the coasts need to get out of their cities every once and a while (or just out of their universities, for a start) if they want to be taken seriously when they make a legitimate point.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 2

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images