saddity - sah-dit-TEE - n., slang - is an African-American word for “stuck-up superior-acting black folks.” I was wondering if anyone here had an idea of the regional and circa origin for the term. I suspect it’s west coast, but I’ve heard it used by both east and west coast rappers, due to its irresistable rhyming marriage with “pretty.”
Thanks.
Apparently its exact origin is unknown.
**A word (origin unknown, earliest O.E.D. citation 1967 in Jet: “Eartha . . . is considered ‘seditty’ by many Negroes.”) meaning “uppity,” also spell’d “saditty.” **
I have no cite but I suspect “saditty” has been around decades longer than the 1960s.
I have my DARE [Dictionary of American Regional English]. This volume was published in 2002. And the earliest they could find was that Jet cite.
There are so many spellings of this, you could drive yourself crazy. It was obiously a spoken word well before the print cites.
saddity, sadiddy, saditty, seditty, siddity
I can give you cites from that source from every year, starting in 1967. So, it wasn’t a modern rapper invention.
samclem. Heh. I managed the trick of spelling it two different ways already. It’s still not terribly well-known black American slang.
pinkfreude. Skimming the page, I don’t see your cite on that link. Mind narrowing it down?
I asked the question over at the American Dialect Society. We have a great member over there who is a professional linguist, black, and grew up in St. Louis in the 1930’s-'40’s. I hope to report back with some info.
Speculation:
Maybe a weak connection to “seditious?”
samclem. Even if you don’t hear back from him with a definitive answer, you rock for the effort. Thanks!
“What’s saditty?”
“It’s a short song. Why?”
Don’t mind me. I’m subscribing to the thread in case of a definitive answer.
It’s near the bottom of the page, right above the text that says “Wednesday, June 01, 2005.”
The board member certainly knew it as a word used by his parents in the 1940’s or earlier. The accent was on the middle syllable.
But he had no insight as to origin. There are still people contributing to my question over there, but so far no one can put a definite answer to it.
I’ll try to check back.
I’m going to offer this as a conjecture rather than an answer, because I don’t have the resources to confirm it. I think “Saditty” could be a corruption of “Mr./Ms. Saturday,” which was used to describe someone who wore his/her flashiest (Saturday night) clothes to casual weekday gatherings, just so s/he could be the best-dressed person in the room. No idea about the circumstances of its origin, but I heard it from old people when I was young, so it would likely be the better part of a century. And I grew up on the East coast.
Sorry I can’t provide anything more authoritative than my memory and a guess, but perhaps someone with more resources and ability than I might look into it, if all else fails.
Sorry to drag up this somewhat zombiefied thread, but I think I may have found another connection to the origins of saditty that may shed light on my original query.
I’m currently reading “Remember Me To Harlem” which is a compilation of letters and other correspondence between the writers Carl Van Vetchen and Langston Hughes from 1925-1964, and it gives some interesting insight to the lives of both men, Hughes’ likely bisexuality and the dynamics of the elite, popular and folk artists in the Harlem Renaissance.
In a July 15, 1927 letter to Van Vecten Hughes writes about his stay in New Orleans, saying: “I was in New Orleans three weeks without meeting a single “dicty” person.” The footnote by Emily Bernard indicates that ‘dicty’ is African American slang for a “snobbish, self-important person.”
Here’s another link from Word Maven.
Well, the terms “saddity” and “dicty” sound and awful lot alike, the definitions are virtually identical, and a simple regional preference between say, northern and southern blacks may account for the different pronounciations.
One of these days I’ll figure this out.