Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

In the seventies, there was a popular bumper sticker that said, "What if they had a war and nobody came?" Miss Poubelle's question for the month is the linguistic equivalent-- What if there were a popular new word, and nobody knew what it meant?

That is pretty much the conclusion that she has come to after looking at the way people use the expressions gettin' jiggy and gettin' jiggy with it. Her research turned up no less than seven different definitions: 1) to dance, 2) to have sex, 3) to have a lot of money, 4) to be cool, 5) to wear nice clothes, 6) to be stylish, fly, and 7) to be loose, relaxed. The first two meanings-- dancing and having sex-- are the most frequent, but it is clear that people have different notions of what gettin' jiggy means.

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So far as Miss Poubelle can determine, the phrase originates with Will Smith. Readers may remember Smith from a controversy a few years back when he starred in Six Degrees of Separation and refused to fulfill the script's call to kiss another man, advised that a male-to-male kiss would ruin his career.

Smith is both an actor and a rapper, and jiggy seems to have originated with Smith's hit rap song Gettin' Jiggy Wit It, which first appeared in 1997. A close look at the lyrics shows that for Smith, gettin' jiggy probably meant something like 'dancing'. At the beginning of the song, he raps

on your mark ready set let's go
dance floor pro I know you know
I go psycho when my new joint hit
just can't sit
gotta get jiggy wit it

and this appears to mean dancing. A bit later he says

everybody lookin' at me
glancin' the kid
wishin' they was dancin' a jig.

He continues

illway the an-may on the ance-day oor-flay
givin' up jiggy make it feel like foreplay.

The first line is pig Latin, of course, which is a convenient way to find a rhyme for foreplay. But note that givin' up jiggy is once again clearly dancing, since he's doing it out on the dance floor.

It is only somewhat later that we wonder if jiggy has another meaning, when he raps

only mad chicks ride in my whips
south to the west to the east to the north
bought my hits and watch 'em go off a go off
ah yes yes y'all and ya don't stop
in the winter or the (summertime)
I makes it hot
gettin jiggy wit 'em.

Is Will merely talking about dancing with these mad chicks, or is there something else going on?

In last month's column, Miss Poubelle talked about shag, which means 'to have sex' in British English, but is also the name of a dance popular along the Carolina coast. The common semantics is the back and forth motion, and shag seems to be historically related to the word shake.

A similar development is going on here. A jig is a dance, and it is probably connected historically with words like jiggle and jog, which describe up and down, back and forth motion. There is even historical precedent for words related to jig being used for sex. The Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for jig-a-jig, which has two senses. The first refers to a jiggling motion, but the second sense, going back to 1896, refers to sex. We can see this in this 1932 quote-- "This was... the red lamp district... The women stopped... 'Jig-a-jig, Johnny? Very nice!'"

Miss Poubelle finds jig-a-jig to be an obscure bit of slang, and she doubts that Will Smith consulted the OED before writing his song. It is more likely that the connection between 1) having sex and 2) shaking, jiggling, and dancing is a pretty obvious one, and likely to be made over and over again.

That accounts for the two most frequent senses of gettin' jiggy, but what about the others? Miss Poubelle's best guess is that people who heard Will Smith's song liked it, and thought gettin' jiggy wit it was a cool phrase. But they weren't exactly sure what it meant, so they made their best guesses.

The rap genre involves performers, mostly male, who boast about money, fame, cars, clothes, and sexual prowess. In Will Smith's song in particular, he brags about his skill in dancing, his looks, his expensive cigars, his courtside tickets at the Lakers games, his acquaintanceship with famous athletes, and the fact that women all over the world want to have sex with him.

People hearing the song might conclude that when Smith says he's gettin' jiggy wit it, he means that he's sexy, he has good clothes, he's cool, he's stylish, he's relaxed, or he has lots of money.

Rap producers have decided that gay people don't buy rap, so it doesn't matter if it offends us, and even Smith seems to have bought into this belief. Our community and our concerns often do seem distant from young rap fans. But the gay community and the young people who listen to rap do share at least one important characteristic. We're both willing to challenge the larger society around us. And we don't need anyone to tell us who we can get jiggy with.