I watched the Mtv Video Music Awards the other night and heard the lyric above (A song by Jay-Z titled “Get’cha damn hands up”). Later on in the show rap artists began speaking using “Izz” inside of words. Snoop Dogg basically translated what Johnny Knoxville said using this
form of speech.
Can anyone help me? I teach Communications and cannot find any information on how this format works or what rules there are to follow. I can’t even figure out what the heck the subject line is to mean.
I’m not an authority on the subject, but my friends and I tend to incorporate the more ridiculous aspects of current slang into our collective patois, and this one made the cut. They may not be the accepted rules, but the way we do it:
If the word begins with a vowel sound, the “izz” precedes it. e.g. “izzout”, “izzicicle”.
If the word begins with a consonant, the “izz” is infixed between the initial consonant sound and the first vowel sound. e.g. “shizzit”, bizzomb"
I’ve heard the “H to the O, V to the A” format before, but never with the “izzes” inserted. My experience with that has been that the first letter is normal, and subsequent letters are prefaced with “to the” (“I’m the M to the C to the A…” - Beastie Boys). Maybe this is a variation, or perhaps I just don’t fully understand the rules. Anyway, hope that helps.
typo got the basics right. Snoop Dogg is generally credited with popularizing – though not inventing – the concatenation of “iz” within words. Check out his debut album “Doggystyle” to hear, for example, the word “bizotch” numerous times (a twist on “beeotch,” itself of course being a corruption of “bitch”). There’s even a song titled “Tha Shiznit” on the album. So you can take some liberties with adding “iz” to words – pretty much the speaker’s choice of what sounds better. Jay-Z’s song does just that, for example substituting “nizzah” for the N-word.
For those who choose to speak entirely using this structure (a la Snoop on the VMA’s), its function is along the lines of Pig Latin. To wit: those not in the know are left scratching their hizzeads.
maybe I’m completely wrong, but I thought that this is just another example of old slang revitalized - I think that this was part of slang that was used by bebop artists during the fifties/sixties. No cite, and I could be completely wrong, but I know that me and my friends were using this to spice up words back in the early nineties, and I didn’t consider it to be a hip-hop or rap thing…
Hmmm, it very well could have been appropriated from the scat-masters of the olden days, but Snoop is still responsible for its current popularity. “Doggystyle” came out in either 1992 or '93 (was Snoop doing it on Dre’s “Chronic” album a couple years earlier?), which likely explains what influenced you and your friends to use it around that time.
I also vaguely remember a song from the early 90s called “Mad Izm” – “izm” being a fad slang word for weed at the time. AFAIK it hasn’t been used in that sense for a long while.
My dad taught me something more or less the same using “op” and “lop” instead of “izz”. He’d learned the joke in his childhood. We are talking 1940’s. And he grew up in a very small town in the boondocks. He would not have been listening to bop or rap. Ain’t nothing new under the sun.