"H-E Double Hockey Sticks"
By Brian Salkowski
The lifespan of a given slang word or even a explicit cuss word is fleeting, as new ways of saying the same thing evolve and gain popularity. Thus certain words and phrases can become markers of particular historical moments. When Malice of The Clipse rhymes on “Zen” that “I’m from the old school when the gat was a jammy,” he is calling attention not only to the shifting street terminology for firearms, but also to the power of words to define time and place. (This example is especially ironic since “gat” as used in hip-hop is itself a slang term more than a century old derived from the Gatling gun.) Using the term def, for instance, to say that something is great means that you are most likely somewhere in New York in the 1980s. Def waned in popularity as other terms (phat, dope, fly, official) took over, only to fade out as well; back in 1993, Rick Rubin, co-founder of Def Jam Records with Russell Simmons, even held a mock funeral for “def”—complete with casket. Just like “gat,” it will probably be resurrected. Slang is so prevalent in rap that it supports a cottage industry of online and even print lexicons, the most prominent of which is the Web-based “Urban Dictionary.” The Web site Rap Genius offers line-by-line analysis of rap lyrics, interpreting slang and uncovering nuances of expression. We encourage readers who may be unfamiliar with some of the words in the lyrics to use such resources to explicate these poems of the present, just as one might use the Oxford English Dictionary to discern shades of meaning in poems of the past.