Comment on Uhhh... It's a work phone

• Macchi_the_Slime@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  From what I can gather it’s like a super old racist term for a black person. idk if I’d call it a full on slur, but definitely in that ballpark. But either way we’re talking like 1920s old. Like this term was at least 75 when my wife did this to her grandfather in 2000.

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  • thanatotus@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Good to know, I just remembered this scene from the movie Airplane now: it makes sense what the white lady says now, lol

    m.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j2dVuhr6s

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• andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “Jive” is an older term for what you might call less offensively call Ebonics or AAVE. Popular in the 80’s, I remember my mom talking about having a computer program that would “translate” things into jive.

  “Jigaboo” is a slur for a black person.

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  • derfunkatron@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Yeah, jive isn’t the offensive part; the appropriation mixed with the racist slur is.

    Jive is a set of slang or cant originating from NY jazz culture, specifically Harlem. Jive was a “cool” way of speaking; we owe the word hipster to jive (hep-cats became hepsters became hipsters).

    Jive-ass is just an adjective meaning useless, worthless, or full of shit. A way less offensive variation is jive-ass turkey i.e. a bullshitter. Probably stems from jive speakers using jive to hustle or exclude outsiders from the conversation.

    I think it would be safe to say that jive is a subset of AAVE, but not an equivalent term. AAVE is recognized as the official dialect but jive is specifically tied to music, region, and time period.

    FWIW, I think the humor of the Airplane! jive scene is twofold: 1) it demonstrates how mainstream both jazz and jive had become by the 70s (to point that old white ladies got it) and, 2) the the implication that jive speakers couldn’t understand regular American English and were in need of translation.

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  • thanatotus@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I remember the scene you referenced, and i recall that i hadn’t understood the jive reference then and i just assumed that it was just funny gibberish.

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• LordCrom@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  In the police academy movie, its what the white asshole called the black lady who ran over his foot… which made hightower fucking pissed at him and flipped the car he was hiding in.

  So its probably a bad slur.

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