Back in the day, when I was a talk show host, I interviewed the author of a book called “Juba to Jive.” It was a dictionary of African American slang and was edited by Clarence Major. I thought I had lost this book until I started cleaning out one of my closets, and there it was. I was very happy to find it along with the press release inside, dated February 7, 1994. I have so many books from that talk show era. Two words that I wanted to look up were “dope” and “drip.” I wanted to see what the word meant back in the early nineties. I think it is amazing how the meaning of words changes. According to Juba to Jive, Dope n., adj. (1870s–1990s), was at times also used to refer to illegal drugs, but mainly in mockery of “square” usage; by the 1980s, it was being used as an adjective, meaning good or outstanding. I was surprised by this. I always remember the word dope as a description for drugs, and when I hear younger people say that something is “dope,” I have to remember that they mean it’s good. As for “drip,” it was not found in Juba to Jive, but I was able to find many videos and definitions of the word on the internet. What does drip mean? When you’ve got the drip or are dripping, it means, in slang, that your look or style is extremely fashionable or sexy. And then I remembered back in the day that I used to hear people say that someone was “dripping” in furs or diamonds. I bet these kids don’t know that the old heads used to use a version of this word as well. For the most part, a little research will reveal it all. And by the way, I still keep a hard-copy dictionary and thesaurus.
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