Gen X Ruminations: Word to Your Mother
It’s a phrase that went sour faster than a half can of Stag sitting in the sun, and with good reason. Today, it’s a bad joke and folks are rightfully encouraged from ever uttering “word to you mother” with any sincere intent. In truth, simply saying, “Word!” will convey the joke all by itself.
But, after this linguistic fossil took hold in the late 1980s, and was sadly carved in stone by Vanilla Ice in 1990, I would later wonder, “What the hell does that mean?” (Spoken in the voice of an annoyed Frank Costanza.) On the face of it, it doesn’t mean anything so where did it come from?
The language blog linguaholic.com does a pretty good job of explaining that, during the late 80s, the phrase “word to THE mother” rose to prominence as a reference to Africa: the Motherland. Within this context, it came to mean “truth” or “testify” and was understood to endorse expressions or ideas that were widely accepted as correct. The blog goes on to explain that this unfortunately morphed into “word to YOUR mother” as either an endorsement, or insult, depending on how it was used. (In most cases, references to your mother were not used in a positive fashion.) Ultimately, the general consensus was that no one really comes off looking good using this phrase and, by 1995 at the very latest, it was…well…just lame.
But, with all due respect to linguaholic.com, I eventually recalled something else. Let’s cut to the sweaty street of North St. Louis County during the summer of 1989. LL Cool J (“and the J is for Jeremy”) had just released Walking with a Panther, his third studio album. The boombox was in the street, the hacky sack was arcing around the circle and we were checking out the tracks when Jingling Baby came on. It’s a classic LL rap, promising destruction to all sucka MCs by a variety of means.
But…there’s a line. A line right in the middle of the song that has forever stuck in my head. If you watch the video on Youtube, you’ll catch it. It says:
“I’m a bad… (Word to the mother!)”
LL delivers the intro “I’m a bad” and someone replies with “word to the mother”. The thing is, that’s not how I heard it and, even as I watch the video, I still can’t quite hear it that way.
In my mind, what I heard was, “I’m a bad…word to your mother!” (Some online lyric transcriptions even have it as, “I’m a bad…word to my mother”). Now, these make sense. I mean, my mother disdained profanity of any kind, so I know what a “bad word” was to her. And, LL is clearly a bad man — as he declared several times previously — so it makes sense that he could be a bad…word to my mother. (Pick any bad word you prefer. In my mother’s case, you’d be right.)
So, linguaholic.com wasn’t wrong. LL was asserting his unquestioned badness, and an unknown vocal talent responded with “word to the mother” to endorse the truth of it.
But I was a white kid who didn’t understand the connection to the Motherland, so I heard it differently. I heard he was a bad — critical pause — word to your mother. And, taken as a whole, that made sense. LL Cool J is a bad word to your mother. As the hacky sack jumped from the sides of our untied Kangaroo high-tops, it bore its way into our collective consciousness.
But don’t blame us. Don’t even blame Vanilla Ice — there’s plenty of other things you can kick him for. No, you can lay the blame at the doorstep of the man who urged all of us to “forget Oreos eat Cool J cookies!”
