Americana: Beyond Greys

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Some Negro terms are virtually untranslatable into ordinary English. To bag means (among other things) to pursue one's own pleasures. Hummy (as in "I went there hummy") means, roughly, "with expectations that were disappointed."

Like other varieties of language, Negro argot is always in flux. Terms that are widely adopted by whites go out of style among Negroes, or take on radically different meanings. Square has lately come to mean cigarette, is losing the meaning—not hip—that is familiar to whites. "When it's hip among whites," says one white investigator of the Negro argot, "it's already square among Negroes."