By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. In this final language-themed Black History Month article, I want to reflect on my first close encounter...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
In this final language-themed Black History Month
article, I want to reflect on my first close encounter with American colloquial
English by way of Malcolm X, the fiery African-American civil and human rights
activist whose supreme oratorical genius held Americans spellbound for nearly two
decades.
When I was an undergraduate at Bayero University in
Kano, I was a student union activist. Part of the unwritten rules of student
union activism during my time was a commitment to memorizing speeches and
passages from the icons of revolutionary theory and praxis—Karl Marx, Vladimir
Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Ernesto “Che” Gwevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr.,
etc.
In my second year in the university, a man by the
name of Ibrahim Ali (whom we called Ib’s) introduced me to Malcolm X’s
speeches. He had scores of audio tapes of Malcolm X’s speeches from the early
1950s when he came on the American political scene to the late 1960s when he
was assassinated. Ibrahim’s older brothers, who were fans of Malcolm X and
students of America’s civil rights struggles, gave him the tapes.
But as a
student of language, the tapes had a dual appeal for me: they not only stirred
revolutionary consciousness in me (although I often found some of Malcolm X’s
earlier blanket anti-white racism unacceptable since I found it contrary to the
Trotskyist proletarian internationalism that I had subscribed to), they also
provided me an introduction to American colloquial English. I learned more
informal American English expressions from Malcolm X’s speeches than I did from
the Voice of America, which I regularly listened to.
Below are the top 5 colloquial American English
expressions I first heard from Malcolm X’s speeches:
1.
“Catch hell.” The very first Malcolm X speech I
listened to—and later memorized, along with several others—was a folksy speech
he delivered on November 10, 1963 in Detroit, Michigan, called “Message to the
Grassroots.” In the speech, he made copious references to “catching hell.”
About a
minute into the speech, he said, “You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Baptist,
and you don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist. You don’t catch hell ’cause
you’re a Methodist or Baptist. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat
or a Republican. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk. And you
sure don’t catch hell ’cause you’re an American; ’cause if you was an American,
you wouldn’t catch no hell. You catch hell ’cause you’re a black man. You catch
hell, all of us catch hell, for the same reason.”
That’s a lot of “catching hell.” As you can see,
“catch hell” appears in every sentence in the excerpt. I recall thinking: what
the hell does “catch hell” mean? Its persistent recurrence in Malcolm X’s other
speeches provoked my curiosity about its meaning. From the context of its
usage, I guessed that it meant “suffer a terrible fate.” I later learned that
it actually means to reprimand someone severely, as in “I will catch hell from
my father if I fail my exams.” Malcolm X’s use of “catch hell” in the quoted
passage—and in his other speeches that I’d memorized— is certainly more intense
than a mere reprimand.
In British English, the expression is rendered as
“get hell.”
2.
“Even Steven.” In the same speech, while advocating
self-defense in the face of rising violence against American blacks in the early
1960s, Malcolm X said: “No, preserve your life. It’s the best thing you got. And if you got to give it up, let it be even-steven.”
The phrase “even-steven” stood out for me. Although
the context suggested the meaning to me, I looked it up to be sure what it
exactly meant. I found out that it’s a colloquialism in American English that
means “tied,” “balanced,” “equally divided.” For example, if you slap me and I
slap you back, we’re even-steven. So Malcolm X was basically saying, “don’t let
someone kill you without a fight. Fight back so that when the attacker kills
you, you will kill him too.”
The
phrase isn’t often used in such morbid contexts, though. It can also mean
having no debt at all (as in: “I’ve paid you back all the money I owed you, so
we’re now even-steven”) or having the same score in a game.
According to Richard A. Spears’s Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial
Expressions, “even-steven” is a rhyming compound that emerged between 1865
and 1870 in American English.
3.
Chitlins. In his inimitably classic distinction between a
“field negro” and a “house negro,” Malcolm X said: “The Negro in the field
didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call ’em
“chitt’lin’” nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts.
That’s what you were — a gut-eater. And some of you are still gut-eaters.”
I learned a few things from that quote. One, I
learned that “hog” is another word for “pig.” It’s amazing how many words the
English language has for pig: hog, swine, grunter, squealer, boar, Sus scrofa, etc.
Most other domestic animals have just one name.
Well, I also learned that “chitlins” means the
intestines of a pig, which American blacks ate as food during slavery because
it was one of the only few sources of protein available to them. Several
decades after slavery, chitlins (also spelled chitlings and chitterlings) are
an African-American delicacy.
No one knows how the word “chitlins came about,
but it’s now usual to use it to mean the intestines of any animal prepared as
food. So what Yoruba people call “orisirisi,”
or what Nigerian English speakers call “assorted,” that is, the cooked entrails
of a cow, would qualify as “chitlins.”
4.
“Chump.” In his “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech on April
3, 1964, Malcolm X said the black man in America was “a chump, a political
chump,” for voting white Democrats in Congress and naively expecting them to
pass civil rights legislation to favor black people. It turned out that he was wrong
on that one. White Democrats did pass the Civil Rights Act that radically
improved the lot of American Blacks.
A chump, I later learned, is a stupid, gullible
person. The word is used in exactly the same way that Nigerian Pidgin English
speakers, especially 419 scam artists, use “mugu”
or “maga,” that is, a credulous moron.
The Online Etymology Dictionary says the use of “chump”
to mean "blockhead" first
appeared in American English in 1883. Before then, the word
used to mean a "short, thick lump of wood."
5.
Uppity. In several of Malcolm X’s speeches, especially his
autobiographical speeches, he often talked about racists referring to
intelligent black people as “uppity niggers.” Uppity is a colloquial American
English word for “arrogant,” “rebelliously self-assertive,” “snobbish,” etc.
The Online Etymology Dictionary says the word was first used by American blacks
to describe other blacks they considered overly self-assertive, kind of like “bourgie”
in contemporary African-American English.
The British English equivalent for uppity is “uppish.”
Conclusion
I certainly learned a lot more conversational
American English expressions from listening to Malcolm’s speeches than the five
expressions I identified above. I learned many homespun witticisms and turns of
phrases from Malcolm that I don’t have space to write about here.
It was also
through Malcolm X that I first became familiar with African-American Vernacular
English, which I hope to write about in more detail in due course.
I should point out this article isn’t by any means
an endorsement of Malcolm X’s philosophy; it’s just my recollection of how
listening to his speeches introduced me to informal American English when I was
a teenager in the university.
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