Hip Hop Slang Makes No Sense...
rootlesscosmo
12,848 Posts
...sometimes."Selling wolf tickets"???"Shooting the gift"???Anyone got any insights into the linguistic origins of these phrases???
Comments
shooting the gift "of gab"
shooting=spitting=speaking=flowing
shooting gift=gift of gab maybe?
Like Mitch Richmond?
Dude, I think it refers to b-ball shooting skills.
i love when i see old film noir movies and someone says "watch out, he's got a gat!"
from what I've read, Selling Wolf Tickets goes to a (mistaken)reanalysis of woofin. Which was an old Chicago term for talking shit or false threats. I guess slang for lying evolved to "selling woof tickets" which a lot of people mistook for WOLF tickets. But woofin was alyways someone just talking shit. kind of like a dog that's all bark and no bite. straight woofin.
cue wuf tickets - "ya mama"
YADADADADAMEAN?
"Kanye-Tidda" I have problems.
Wolf as in "the boy who cried wolf"... talkin' shit with nothing to substantiate it.
"gezeppoli" is a ficticious Italian dish created by The Black Italiano aka The PopMaster aka prince paul, used in the context of "i fed your girl gezeppoli"
The phrase wolf ticket is a corruption of an African-American slang expression for the practice of verbal intimidation, "sellin' (or passin' out) woof tickets," that was misinterpreted by whites. Over time, the misnomer has become accepted terminology.
"Woofing," or "woofin'," like "signifyin'" and "talkin' trash," is part of the African-American oral tradition. The term is derived from the onomatopoeic expression of the sound of, for instance, a junkyard dog barking to ward off potential intruders.
"Sellin' woof tickets" is engaging in threatening or intimidating verbal aggression, usually without the intent of actually doing physical harm. In West African and African-American cultures, verbal sparring and physical displays traditionally were employed as proxies for physical violence to preserve life and maintain peace and order. Woofin' also can be a means of "calling someone out," of challenging an opponent to a verbal or physical match.
See the dozens.
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_ticket
that's the analogy I was looking for...but woofin was the old term. which probably came from wolfin...backwards from what I said. I read too much into a terminology websites definition.
weed...shrek is green, duh.
Jake And The Fat Man... tv show from the 80's.
Really?? That's interesting... always wondered about that one.
I moved to the US around the time that was on. Before that, growing up in the UK, it was the children's cereal and candy references that really had me