On a warm afternoon in mid April, Robert De Jesus pressed play on an iPod in the plush-carpeted back room of the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew on West 86th Street. “Ebonics,” a song by the late Harlem rapper Big L, blared through the attached speakers.
“Ayo, pay attention and listen real closely how I break this slang shit down,” the M.C. advised. “Check it: my weed smoke is my ‘lye,’ a kilo of coke is a ‘pie,’ when I’m ‘lifted,’ I’m high; with new clothes on, ‘Im fly;’ cars is ‘whips’ and sneakers is ‘kicks’…”
A few of the 20 teenagers in the room nodded their heads with the beat or mouthed the words to the song, first released when most of them were still in elementary school. De Jesus, 30, a senior counselor at the DOME (Developing Opportunities through Meaningful Education) Project, played the track to prime the group for the day’s exercise: the updating of its New York City slang catalog, The Dictionary of Street Communication.
The DOME, as all involved in its operation call it, is a 35-year-old youth center based in a storefront a few doors north of West 83rd Street on Amsterdam Avenue. The kids in its juvenile justice program hail from neighborhoods across the city, but many spend their after-school hours on the Upper West Side at the behest of a judge or parent to have a juvenile record expunged or to prevent one altogether.
In the group’s twice-weekly workshops, 20 or so adolescents learn and discuss topics such as new-media music marketing, sports management as a career or their Miranda rights. The sessions are, by nature, a crossroads of street patois, where jargon that originated in Washington Heights com-mingles with that of Bed-Stuy and the Lower East Side.
Three years ago, the program’s then-new director, Elizabeth O’Connor, 35, struggled to keep track of it all. She scribbled notes on her pad, afraid to interrupt a dialogue, in the hopes of later asking for help. Her clients noticed and took pity.
“Whoever was sitting next to me started acting as my simultaneous translator,” she said. “Somebody would say something, and if I had some puzzled look on my face, they’d whisper to me what it meant.”
After a few months she had larger plans for her collection. “It grew so big, I started seeing it as a dictionary,” O’Connor said.
To fill out the book, she spent a session tossing out categories such as “police,” and seeing how many street synonyms the kids could come up with. The dictionary contains 16 words in that grouping, varying in regard from “jake” to “pork and beans.”
After publishing the first Dictionary of Street Communication in 2005, O’Connor and her co-workers learned just how fluid street slang is. Some terms quickly fell out favor while others took their place. She, De Jesus and two other counselors repeated their initial strategy with a new group of kids on that April afternoon of this year, as they prepared to update the book for its third edition.
“Sometimes when I go hang out with my friends in Harlem, I don’t know what they’re talking about,” said De Jesus, originally from the South Bronx, later in the afternoon while soliciting neighborhood-specific slang from his audience. The group answered his request by revealing that kids uptown had recently been adding the suffix “-ington” to any word they pleased. The gesture, they said, is a nod to Lexington Avenue.
A teen named Xavier suggested the category “guns.” Synonyms rang out from around the room: “hammer,” “ratchet,” “toolie,” “burner,” “toaster.”
Of course, not everyone was happy with the prospect of allowing the world to know what, exactly, those terms meant.
“How you giving up our slang?” a disgruntled boy asked.
“Who thinks that cops don’t already know?” O’Connor said.
A month later, the third edition of the dictionary made its official debut at the Amsterdam Avenue Festival. At 6.5-by-5 inches and 84 hand-cut pages, it is a small document, at least as dictionaries go. With a marker-decorated cover and staples for binding, the book appears more D.I.Y. zine than Merriam-Webster, but it provides definitions and contextual sentences for 355 terms.
Readers of the latest edition learn that “ooh-ooh,” called to a friend to gain his or her attention, is specific to Brooklyn. So is “mugga,” a term for money. Going to “brownsville,” when spoken derisively, means to smoke a cigarette down to its filter. “Roscoe” is an East Harlem phrase for undercover cops. In the Bronx, “88” refers to police in general. The book also covers plenty of citywide slang such as “swagga,” (the way a guy moves), and “bust me down,” (a request to finish a friend’s cigarette).
A month after its debut, a few members of the dictionary’s editorial council sat at a back table of the DOME office discussing their creation. Because many of the participants in the juvenile justice program are there to have their records cleared, they asked that their last names not be used.
Rashid, 20, and Jama, 16, both from Harlem, confronted the idea that their work on the dictionary might let too many people in on the secret.
“I really had bad feelings about it,” said Rashid, who also noted the speed with which words fall out of favor. “Then again, like I said, it will change. It will change.”
“The cops already know,” said Jama. “Blue and whites might not know, blue and white cops. Detectives? The Ds know and the Feds know.”
“There’s different types of slang, there’s just hip, new slang and there’s secretive slang,” said Davon, 17, of the Bronx. He acknowledged that some of the more secretive selections didn’t make it into the dictionary.
“If you put everything in, this joint would be like [this],” Rashid said, stacking a few of the books together and measuring them between his thumb and forefinger.
O’Connor said that, since 2005, the book’s previous iterations have sold about 200 copies and that the third edition has averaged about a sale per day. The $5 donation the DOME receives for each book sold goes to a fund for incentive programs for participants.
Patron Mo Riza, 40, a creative director at a software company, found the dictionary especially illuminating. Riza discovered the dictionary after teaching a class in photography at the DOME and has given copies to friends. “By just reading it you realize how kids are socializing,” he said. “At that age they’re talking a lot about drugs, about being arrested, sex.”
At the office Rashid bristled a little at the characterization. He said that’s not all he and his friends discuss. “Those are the things we don’t want people to hear us talking about,” he said.
According to O’Connor, most sales are to walk- up customers such as tourists, teachers and some of the neighborhood’s elderly, literary-minded residents. She usually warns older patrons of the dictionary’s explicit content, though most are unfazed.
“They’re like, ‘No duh, it’s slang,’”
“Ayo, pay attention and listen real closely how I break this slang shit down,” the M.C. advised. “Check it: my weed smoke is my ‘lye,’ a kilo of coke is a ‘pie,’ when I’m ‘lifted,’ I’m high; with new clothes on, ‘Im fly;’ cars is ‘whips’ and sneakers is ‘kicks’…”
A few of the 20 teenagers in the room nodded their heads with the beat or mouthed the words to the song, first released when most of them were still in elementary school. De Jesus, 30, a senior counselor at the DOME (Developing Opportunities through Meaningful Education) Project, played the track to prime the group for the day’s exercise: the updating of its New York City slang catalog, The Dictionary of Street Communication.
The DOME, as all involved in its operation call it, is a 35-year-old youth center based in a storefront a few doors north of West 83rd Street on Amsterdam Avenue. The kids in its juvenile justice program hail from neighborhoods across the city, but many spend their after-school hours on the Upper West Side at the behest of a judge or parent to have a juvenile record expunged or to prevent one altogether.
In the group’s twice-weekly workshops, 20 or so adolescents learn and discuss topics such as new-media music marketing, sports management as a career or their Miranda rights. The sessions are, by nature, a crossroads of street patois, where jargon that originated in Washington Heights com-mingles with that of Bed-Stuy and the Lower East Side.
Three years ago, the program’s then-new director, Elizabeth O’Connor, 35, struggled to keep track of it all. She scribbled notes on her pad, afraid to interrupt a dialogue, in the hopes of later asking for help. Her clients noticed and took pity.
“Whoever was sitting next to me started acting as my simultaneous translator,” she said. “Somebody would say something, and if I had some puzzled look on my face, they’d whisper to me what it meant.”
After a few months she had larger plans for her collection. “It grew so big, I started seeing it as a dictionary,” O’Connor said.
To fill out the book, she spent a session tossing out categories such as “police,” and seeing how many street synonyms the kids could come up with. The dictionary contains 16 words in that grouping, varying in regard from “jake” to “pork and beans.”
After publishing the first Dictionary of Street Communication in 2005, O’Connor and her co-workers learned just how fluid street slang is. Some terms quickly fell out favor while others took their place. She, De Jesus and two other counselors repeated their initial strategy with a new group of kids on that April afternoon of this year, as they prepared to update the book for its third edition.
“Sometimes when I go hang out with my friends in Harlem, I don’t know what they’re talking about,” said De Jesus, originally from the South Bronx, later in the afternoon while soliciting neighborhood-specific slang from his audience. The group answered his request by revealing that kids uptown had recently been adding the suffix “-ington” to any word they pleased. The gesture, they said, is a nod to Lexington Avenue.
A teen named Xavier suggested the category “guns.” Synonyms rang out from around the room: “hammer,” “ratchet,” “toolie,” “burner,” “toaster.”
Of course, not everyone was happy with the prospect of allowing the world to know what, exactly, those terms meant.
“How you giving up our slang?” a disgruntled boy asked.
“Who thinks that cops don’t already know?” O’Connor said.
A month later, the third edition of the dictionary made its official debut at the Amsterdam Avenue Festival. At 6.5-by-5 inches and 84 hand-cut pages, it is a small document, at least as dictionaries go. With a marker-decorated cover and staples for binding, the book appears more D.I.Y. zine than Merriam-Webster, but it provides definitions and contextual sentences for 355 terms.
Readers of the latest edition learn that “ooh-ooh,” called to a friend to gain his or her attention, is specific to Brooklyn. So is “mugga,” a term for money. Going to “brownsville,” when spoken derisively, means to smoke a cigarette down to its filter. “Roscoe” is an East Harlem phrase for undercover cops. In the Bronx, “88” refers to police in general. The book also covers plenty of citywide slang such as “swagga,” (the way a guy moves), and “bust me down,” (a request to finish a friend’s cigarette).
A month after its debut, a few members of the dictionary’s editorial council sat at a back table of the DOME office discussing their creation. Because many of the participants in the juvenile justice program are there to have their records cleared, they asked that their last names not be used.
Rashid, 20, and Jama, 16, both from Harlem, confronted the idea that their work on the dictionary might let too many people in on the secret.
“I really had bad feelings about it,” said Rashid, who also noted the speed with which words fall out of favor. “Then again, like I said, it will change. It will change.”
“The cops already know,” said Jama. “Blue and whites might not know, blue and white cops. Detectives? The Ds know and the Feds know.”
“There’s different types of slang, there’s just hip, new slang and there’s secretive slang,” said Davon, 17, of the Bronx. He acknowledged that some of the more secretive selections didn’t make it into the dictionary.
“If you put everything in, this joint would be like [this],” Rashid said, stacking a few of the books together and measuring them between his thumb and forefinger.
O’Connor said that, since 2005, the book’s previous iterations have sold about 200 copies and that the third edition has averaged about a sale per day. The $5 donation the DOME receives for each book sold goes to a fund for incentive programs for participants.
Patron Mo Riza, 40, a creative director at a software company, found the dictionary especially illuminating. Riza discovered the dictionary after teaching a class in photography at the DOME and has given copies to friends. “By just reading it you realize how kids are socializing,” he said. “At that age they’re talking a lot about drugs, about being arrested, sex.”
At the office Rashid bristled a little at the characterization. He said that’s not all he and his friends discuss. “Those are the things we don’t want people to hear us talking about,” he said.
According to O’Connor, most sales are to walk- up customers such as tourists, teachers and some of the neighborhood’s elderly, literary-minded residents. She usually warns older patrons of the dictionary’s explicit content, though most are unfazed.
“They’re like, ‘No duh, it’s slang,’”
weed smoke: “lye”
undercover cops: Roscoe
cars: “whips”
money: “mugga”
kilo of coke: “pie”
guns: “hammer,” “ratchet,” “toolie,” “burner,” “toast”
