OED's word of the day
is bootylicious, first documented in 1994. Now I understand meaning #2, "Esp. of a woman, often with reference to the buttocks: sexually attractive, sexy; shapely." But what about meaning #1: "Of rap lyrics: bad, weak. rare"? Is it really an insult for a rapper to tell another rapper that his rhymes were bootylicious? The statements it gives in context seem ambiguous to me. Can someone who knows something about rap clue me in on this?
Obviously that statement was made tongue-in-cheek...
I think it's also a (subtle) misogynistic slam, too, common in hip-hop, i.e. "you rap like a girl".
My guess (I stopped listening to rap in about 1987) is that it means something more specific, viz. "You rap like J.Lo."
It's very rare that I hear anyone use it in the context Snoop used back in the day. From my experience, it's pretty much only used in the positive way.
Indeed. To quote the Beastie Boys:
Professor, what's another word for pirate treasure?
I think it's booty, boot boot booty
That's what it is...
As in:
"That bathroom in the club was booty."
or
"Damn, your ex-girlfriend was one booty-ass ho."
Could just be total BS though.
It depends on the audience, some would say that REM is too girly, or too mainstream, or too commercialized.
I also sort of get the feeling that Snoop was just looking for a word that rhymed, since bootylicious is usually used as a positive term for women. But who knows.
By the way, the OED should date "bootylicious" to 1992 given that "Dre Day" was first released on an album that year.
(I can't believe I'm the first to say this.)
come on. do you have any familiarity with English? (or with rap? it's hard to rhyme callipygian)
Probably because the term "bootylicious" has become a cliche, so overused and dated that even the OED has it as its word of the day, that it's used sarcastically used to call one's lyrics as also being stale or sounding like a guy who just learned some street slang. (see Ice, Vanilla)
Yeah, you're pretty much stuck with your next verse ending in "...river that's all Stygian"
Or, you can realize that "callipygian" is the perfect word to end your rap on! I mean, is there anything more to say after you've said "callipygian"? Well...actually... you probably wouldn't be allowed to say anything more after "callipygian," your career in rap being over and all.
That one's a keeper. Best post all week, surely.
Snoop's line may be the only documented use of sense 1, but it's an enormously influential usage, in one of the very greatest rap singles of all time -- a song that also introduced the word "be-yotch" (phonetic) to the national lexicon. And, not to offend the VC's delicate sensibilities, but the title of the song is not "Dre Day." It's "Fuck Wit Dre Day."
And that's my contribution for tonight.
What about smell-o-vision?
There is a very lame song out there called Bootylicious by Destiny's Child. I'm sure you already know this. PErhpas you didn't know that this particular song is particularly awful.
If someone came up to you after you gave a guest lecture at Yale and told you your speech was very 'George Bush' you'd probably take it as an insult. IF someone told you your latest blog post was very 'Greenwald,' likewise.
So if I go up to Ludacris and tell him his new albuim is pretty 'Bootylicious,' he would thank me for my frank critique.
Uhh, with the exception of Federline and clones, when a white guy uses slang its generally for the humor in the awkwardness of a white guy using slang.
Am I going to have to delve into the great the "correct term" should be "Laser Doppler Velocimetry" vs "Laser Doppler Anemometry" debate? Velocimetry: How can we pollute Englilsh with a Greek/Latin composite. The HORROR! Anemometry: How can we call it a wind meter, when it's first main successful use is measuring velocity in water? The HORROR!
This whole line of argument makes no sense. We are talking about Snoop Dogg, the man who coined the phrase "shizzle", for crying out loud!
There was (and is) a linguistical construction, similar to pig latin, whereby the syllable "iz" was added to the middle of words. This was done to frustrate law-enforcement attempts to surveill drug-dealers. It's hard to get someone for trafficing in "cizaine", "crizack", or "dizope". Snoop merely popularized this construction, or one of its many modifications (he appears to drop the end off of common words, such that people can still comprehend, hence "shizzle" for the word "sure"). Other variants on this style include "izn" (e.g. "shiznit"), "ilzn" (e.g. "dilznick"), and "illy".
Rare is synonymous with bad and weak - Inferior and undesirable? Or rather the use of Boodylicious in that negative context is highly unusual?
"Of rap lyrics: bad, weak. rare"
Rare is synonymous with bad and weak - Inferior and undesirable? Or rather the use of Boodylicious in that negative context is highly unusual?
Though note, in Ireland, rare means both bad and good:
for example, "He is a rare bastard", meaning he is a very bad man
or "we had a rare time" meaning we had an excellent time.
but note that "we had a rare night" can mean both "we had a good night" and "we had a very strange night", but rarely, if at all, "we had a bad night".
The "iz" infix goes way back before rap/hip-hop, particularly in carny slang (its use was called Cazarny, Ciazarn, or Z-latin, after pig-latin). See "Carnival Talk," Louise M. Ackerman _American Speech 35:4, 1960 (available on JSTOR?).
The first rap/hip-hop example is probably "Double Dutch Bus" (Frankie Smith, 1981). When Murry the K (NY disc jockey) used this "dialect" on the air in the 1960's, it was called Meazurry.
Search the archives of the American Dialect Society's email list:
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?S1=ads-l
for "bootylicious" to find a discussion of its origins.
In this context the -licious part of bootylicious doesn't add any meaning, unlike, say, the -tacular in craptacular, which elevates "crap" to mean "spectacularly crap." In fact, as "liberty" pointed out above, -licious just confuses things here. But Snoop has (perhaps misplaced) confidence in us.