Michigan issued a one-word challenge before playing PSU. You probably misunderstood it.

The Big Ten conference suspended Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh while he was incommunicado and airborne on the way to the team’s challenge against Penn State last weekend. The team’s response came quickly from starting quarterback J.J. McCarthy in a one-word tweet:

This was quickly echoed by the rest of the team, the University of Michigan president, Santa Ono, and even Tom Brady. The news outlets went after it, with People Magazine, Sports Illustrated, the Detroit Free Press and others covering the tweets. They reported bet as having a variety of meanings: “most often used as a term of agreement…used in this instance by players to defiantly signal the players’ thoughts on the Big Ten decision” (People), “used when you’re in agreement with something, but often in a sarcastic, defiant tone” (Sports Illustrated). People made fun of it, saying that Michigan was being accused of sign stealing and now wanted to bet illegally as well. Some just admitted it outright: they were confused, even as others seemed to be thrilled:

Why all this to-do over a one-word answer? And why are so many people not sure what the heck this means? Well, there’s a two-word answer:

Black Language.

Black Language, also known as African American English or African American Vernacular English, is a grammatically-patterned variety of English spoken by many, but not all, and not exclusively, African Americans in the United States. It’s responsible for structures like “he cool” where the verb is or are can be variably expressed, or the use of multiple negative words like “didn’t nobody do nothing” to intensify the negative meaning of a sentence. While its increasing appropriation by younger, non-Black speakers like McCarthy himself has led some to erroneously call aspects of it “Gen Z” slang, the variety remains rooted in the Black communities where it began.

While a lot of discussion around Black Language often centers on these sorts of grammatical features or on words with their roots in Black Language like bae, pressed, or shorty, there’s an aspect of Black Language which goes under-examined by mainstream outlets, and that’s the concept of camouflaged language.

Camouflage is a longstanding feature of Black Language, which buries an alternate meaning in a word or structure that otherwise sounds exactly like standardized, white varieties of English. One of the most well-known examples of camouflaged Black Language is in the phrase “talking about” e.g. “they came in here talking about they were going to beat Michigan.” To an ear which doesn’t hear the camouflage, it might sound like all that is happening is that someone is having a discourse about beating the Wolverines. But to a user of Black English, the phrase carries a meaning of indignant defiance — the person in question is definitely not going to beat the Wolverines, and is talking a big game about their chances of doing so.

Misunderstandings about camouflaged Black Language lead to at best confusion and at worst significant misunderstandings. For example, linguists John R. Rickford and Sharese King writing in the journal Language in 2016, examined a recording from a jail cell call in which the speaker said “He come tell (me) about I’m gonna take the TV” which Black Language users would likely interpret as something like a scoffing, “This guy is so dumb he thought I was going to take the TV (and of course I wasn’t).” What the court transcriber wrote, however, was “I’m gonna take the TV,” ignoring the camouflaged phrase and concluding exactly the opposite meaning of what was intended.

Thankfully, nothing nearly as dire as criminal motive is on display with McCarthy’s tweet and its responses. But the misunderstandings abound nevertheless, with some even suggesting it means “beat every team.”

Perhaps because it’s publishing for a city with a 75% Black population, The Detroit Free Press is the only outlet to have correctly pinpointed the meaning of bet:

The term bet, as Brady and the Wolverines players are using it, doesn’t refer to the act of making a wager. Instead, it’s more of an acknowledgement of a statement or challenge that has been issued — in this case, traversing the rest of the regular season without Harbaugh on the sidelines.

Like “talking about,” bet is a camouflage of defiance, a means of saying “challenge accepted” or a verbal version of Morpheus’ famously memed hand gesture from The Matrix:

Black Language is a survival language, born out of the struggle of Black Americans. So it should be no surprise that it hides a linguistic throwdown in language that white people are likely to misunderstand. But when you see the t-shirts which inevitably popped up in the wake of McCarthy’s now famous tweet, their meaning isn’t “let’s take a bet” or “you can bet on us” and certainly not “agreement” with the head coach’s suspension. It’s Black Language showing up, and letting the entire Michigan squad say in one word, “No coach? No problem. Come at us, bro.”