From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.
I'm John McWhorter.
I want to try something today, try something, so to speak, which is this.
Language is always going on and it's so easy to miss it, especially if you think, as we all think,
that something that you haven't heard before is just something called slang that belongs in the bottom of some bucket and it's probably going away.
Not necessarily.
And even if slang is going away, even if it only exists for 10 minutes,
it's almost always interesting in some way.
I want you to listen.
to a couple of lines from a delightful sitcom.
It's a black sitcom called South Side,
which is every bit as clever as, for example, Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
It's been respectfully covered, but more people need to look at it.
I highly recommend it.
It's on HBO Max.
It's only been running for three years, so you don't have that much to catch up with.
And a lot of the fun is the way they talk.
It's a very... current, fluent, and nuanced Black English,
I want you to listen to something which, as far as I know, is relatively new in the dialect.
I doubt if anybody is really thinking very much about it, but listen to this.