AAVE question

In My Humble Opinion
1

The thread that shall not be mentioned got me thinking about a question I have had for a while. I have noticed the following many times:

Me, white person: where do you live?
Black person: I stay on the east side OR I stay in Nashville.

Now, not all black people use “stay” but a significant number do, and I don’t think I have ever heard a white person say it, except in the sense of “i am staying with my mom right now” to mean temporarily visiting or living for a short time. I have heard black people use this to refer to a place that seems to be a permanent residence. My experience with other cultures is too limited to say, so maybe other folks use “stay” in this way as well.

So, here’s the question: does stay translate directly to live or abide, or is there a nuance I am missing?

2

Not sure if it’s AAVE per se, but it is a colloquialism that Black folk tend to have. I have heard many people in a causal setting mention where they stay, or whom they stay with.

3

Well, poorer people have more temporary residences in general, or at least want to portray them that way (for example if you’re 25 and still live with your mom, but hey, you’re gonna move out any day now). I don’t think it has any deep meaning really, and anyone could say it even if they’ve lived securely in the same house for 10 years, but I would guess that’s kind of where it came from.

4

Yeah. It’s common to hear, “Where you stay at?” to mean, “Where do you live?” We use both phrases.

Hippy, where were you earlier! I was so frustrated. You should have been in there to help me explain!

5

I remember the first time I ever heard “stay” used to mean “reside”. I was in 4th grade, and one of my classmates, a Black kid, asked me where I “stayed,” because he wanted to come over after school. I told him to meet me at the side of the school after class let out.

And after school let out, he did come over to the side of the building. It didn’t take long before I understood that he was asking where I lived, and he was talking about coming over to my home. I told him then that I lived way out in the country, and I didn’ think he’d be able to just walk over.

As it turned out, both of us did, but not in the same area. I lived 20 miles west of the school, and my classmate lived 15 miles north.

6

So, no nuance then? “Stay” means the same as “live” and they are used interchangeably.

Thanks.

7

Yes. By every black person every time, always, bar none, never wavering. If anyone dares to say different, you send them to Nzinga!

8

What’s the difference between the two?

9

Let me ask a related question. I’m interested in place-names, and in Chicago there’s a lot of attention paid to neighborhood names. Among white people on the North Side, that is. I have the sense that “neighborhoods” on the primarily black West and South Sides are much larger and more unbounded. That African-Americans are more likely to say “I stay down by 87th & Ashland” than to say “I stay in Auburn/Gresham.” Are distinctive neighborhood names primarily a white thing?

10

Not at all here in Seattle that I can think of.

11

Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “stay” used to mean “live permanently” by anyone of any race.

12

**Rhiannon8404, ** I heard this more in Detroit than Tennessee, so it may be somewhat regional.

13

I live in CA, and never here “stay”. I hear “donde vives” all the time, though. :slight_smile:

14

Yes. Where you “stay,” “stay at,” or “live” are the same thing. It has nothing to do with the transiency of residence, and are just different ways of referring to where you live. And if anybody tries to argue with me about this, so help me god…

Strangely, and I don’t know if this is a consistent thing like the use of the “habitual be” or using “stay” and “live” interchangeably, I’ve heard black people more frequently describe where we live by using intersections and not neighborhood names. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Chicago, as the same was the case back in Los Angeles and everywhere else.

15

Strangely enough, my sister spent a couple of minutes today explaining that she doesn’t live at the house where she is 90% of the time; she stays there. I guess she needs to go see Nzinga, or she joined this board and is screwing with me.

16

I’ll go over and straighten her out, Omega. Where she stay?

17

I wonder if this is recent to CA…first noticed it about a year ago, talking to a black woman in South L.A. It’s sort of jarring but just watching tv it seems ubiquitous (though exclusively black-colloquial/AAVE).

18

No, it is not. I was born and raised in LA, and unless you consider my birth recent (it is not), this has been going on for decades.

19

I never have either. (But it was established in the thread discussing “ashy skin” that I’ve never been around black people much.)

Something I have heard from Hispanic people around here-- South Texas-- is “I got *off *the car,” instead of “I got out of the car.” I wondered if that comes from a literal translation of a way of saying it in Spanish.

20

This remind me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where it was pointed out that in Brooklyn, “stood” is the past tense of “stay” and leads to such sentences as “I stood in bed all day.”

Do people in Brooklyn still say this? The book was published in the 40s and is set in the early 1900s.