What is “throwing shade”? Not familiar with the phrase.
It means acting in a condescending and insulting manner.
Thanks. Is it an Americanism? I’ve never heard it before.
It’s fairly recent slang, and used more often by young people than geriatric senators. My parents–who are Bernie’s age–would have no idea what it means.
But . . . I like shade!
Not if they’re thrown at you. Those umbrella points hurt…
Only heard this for the first time about a year ago. Don’t know where it came from, seems like a weak idiom, nothing about it connotes it’s meaning, seems more like a euphemism for something that doesn’t need euphemizing.
It comes from the LGBT community, specifically the Latino one, I think. It’s related to the phrase “being shady”. I think originally it was supposed to be an underhanded indirect insult. Now it seems to be any insulting behavior.
I’ve always had this image of holding you hand in front of someone’s face.
The underline doesn’t surprise me at all. The guesses I chopped off are wrong: it’s a direct translation from Spanish, see hacer sombra. “To make someone look bad by comparison”; apparently the “by comparison” has been lost in translation.
That makes some sense out of it. Doesn’t work for me, but maybe it will catch on. I have a little feeling now that it may be assumed to be a euphemism by substituting ‘shade’ for another word.
Paris is Burning, the 1990 documentary about the LGBT community in 1987 NYC, had a short description of “shade”, seen here (warning: some NSFW language). So it’s been around for a while, but Google searches for it didn’t start peaking until 2013 when it was used in the headline of a Gawker article about Michelle Obama.
I’ve only ever heard ‘casting shade’, but casting is a synonym for throwing anyway.
I first heard the term on RuPaul’s Drag Race, but many of my students now use it (and sadly, it appears even the gay ones don’t watch RDR).
I can’t speak to its origin, but I’ve known about it for years, and I don’t really associate it with the Latino community, let alone the LGBT one. It’s just more urban–and I don’t mean that as a euphemism for black.
I can point out that it’s been on Urban Dictionary since 2006.
I have also been aware of it for a number of years and don’t associate it with LGBT or latino community in particular either. I became aware of it when I was working in a high school around 2010/2011. The recent episode of Surprisingly Awesome links the cultural practice of this sort of indirect insult to the African American community going back to times in slave days where directly speaking your mind could put you in physical danger.
Don’t know how well supported that is, but they do talk with Professors and ethnographers. They don’t specifically go into the origin of the phrase though.
Too late to edit again. The phrase always makes me think of the Janelle Monae song Q.U.E.E.N. so I went to see if there was a Genius annotation that looked like it was worth something. And there is.
If you can trust that annotation it would seem that it’s a phrase that jumped from AAVE to the drag community in the early 90s (specifically though the film Paris is Burning), and then grew from there.
The usage on Google nGrams seems to pick up around 1990 as well. Before then, most of the usages that Google shows appear to be gardening journals and descriptions of trees in short stories.
In the late-1980s in L.A. I heard ‘giving shade’ (from a lesbian), and it meant overtly ignoring someone.
Now, wait a minute. Bernie Sanders and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz are in the political campaign biz. Candidates continually seek the spotlight, or limelight. That’s politi-speak for grabbing the attention of the voters.
Thus, if Debbie throws shade on Bernie’s campaign, she’s blocking the spotlight of public attention. That’s what it looks like to me.