Job Discussion Forums

[Perilla]

"Sorry my bad."

Does anyone know the origin of this expression? It really gets my goat ...

[Insubordination]

When did the verb 'to hate' become the phrasal verb 'to hate on'? What is the difference in meaning?

[spiral78]

Should be on the 'peeve' thread, I think...

'My bad' peeves me too

[johntpartee]

[Sashadroogie]

To hate on? Never came across this one - put it on the peeves list quick!

Horrible nasty phrase.

[bje]

[johnslat]

"My bad" origin

Meaning

My mistake - I'm to blame.

Origin

This slang term originated in about 1970. At that time, i.e. pre the widespread use of the Internet, slang terms often circulated at street level for many years before being adopted by anyone who felt inclined to write them down. That's clearly not the case any longer of course and any word or phrase that is widely known is dateable quite precisely via website logs.

The first citation in print is C. Wielgus and A. Wolff's, 'Back-in-your-face Guide to Pick-up Basketball', 1986:

"My bad, an expression of contrition uttered after making a bad pass or missing an opponent."

The best evidence obtainable at present points to Manute Bol (above), the 7'7" Sudanese NBA player whose native tongue was Dinka, as the inventor, sometime in the 1980s, of this now�ubiquitous phrase.

Geoffrey K. Pullum told the story in his December 7, 2005 blog post.

Here is the relevant portion:
Ken Arneson emailed me to say that he heard the phrase was first used by the Sudanese immigrant basketball player Manute Bol, believed to have been a native speaker of Dinka (a very interesting and thoroughly un-Indo-Europeanlike language of the Nilo-Saharan superfamily).

Says Arneson, "I first heard the phrase here in the Bay Area when Bol joined the Golden State Warriors in 1988, when several Warriors players started using the phrase."

And Ben Zimmer's rummaging in the newspaper files down in the basement of Language Log Plaza produced a couple of early 1989 quotes that confirm this convincingly:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 10, 1989: When he [Manute Bol] throws a bad pass, he'll say, "My bad" instead of "My fault," and now all the other players say the same thing.

USA Today, Jan. 27, 1989: After making a bad pass, instead of saying "my fault," Manute Bol says, "my bad." Now all the other Warriors say it too.

So all of this is compatible with a date of origin for the phrase in the early 1980s (Manute Bol first joined the NBA in 1985 but came to the USA before that, around 1980).

Shakespeare used the term with something like the current meaning, in his Sonnet 112:

Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp'd upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o'er-green my bad, my good allow?

That's clearly just coincidence, and it's hardly surprising that such a fragmentary phrase would appear in a large body of work like Shakespeare's. It's also a world away from pick-up basketball, which is an informal street sport where players frequently call out to each other (trash talking), and is a well-known source of street lang.


My bad' came into widespread popular use in the mid to late-1990s in the USA via the 1995 movie �Clueless�. This starred Alicia Silverstone and contains what seems to have been the first use of the phrase in the mainstream media. The 1994 'Green revision pages' for the movie script has a scene with Alicia Silverstone's character learning to drive:

"Cher swerves - to avoid killing a person on a bicycle. Cher: Whoops, my bad."

Although a street term, it is virtually synonymous with the earlier Latin phrase, 'mea culpa'. It doubtless has as little of a direct descent from this as it does from Shakespeare's Sonnet 112.

'My bad' has gained that unequivocal accolade - imitation. In REM's 2004 song 'Leaving New York' there is this verse, which as you see includes 'my proud':

You might have laughed if I told you
You might have hidden a frown
You might have succeeded in changing me
I might have been turned around
It's easier to leave than to be left behind
Leaving was never my proud
Leaving New York, never easy
I saw the light fading out

The Doonesbury cartoon strip for 14th June 2006 included this:

"Okay, I'm bitter that I have to support myself! There I said it! My brave."



http://www.bookofjoe.com/2006/02/the_origin_of_m.html

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/my-bad.html

Probably a lot more than anyone really wanted to know. Sorry - my bad.

Regards,
John

[Isla Guapa]

[HLJHLJ]

Manute Bol is unlikely to have been the originator, though he may well have popularised it.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/dcsportsbog/2010/06/manute_bol_did_not_coin_my_bad.html

[johnslat]

Dear HLJHLJ,

"Manute Bol is unlikely to have been the originator, though he may well have popularised it."

Umm, yeah.


"This slang term originated in about 1970. At that time, i.e. pre the widespread use of the Internet, slang terms often circulated at street level for many years before being adopted by anyone who felt inclined to write them down."

Regards,
John

[HLJHLJ]

[johnslat]

Dear HLJHLJ,

Sorry to have confused you - I was trying be be (perhaps too) inclusive - which is why I provided two links.

Regards,
John

[Guy Courchesne]

[Isla Guapa]

I wonder why "My bad" makes me cringe

[fladude]