January 11, 2000

My bad!

I am a high school teacher in an inner city public school in Manhattan. Lately I have been hearing many students saying "My bad!" if they make a mistake. I was wondering if you are aware of this term and if it goes beyond the locality of New York City.

The exclamation My bad! is an apologetic way of saying 'My fault! My mistake!' It's said to derive from the game of pick-up basketball, popular in the inner cities. A player may say it when a foul is committed or when the ball goes out of bounds. Generally, black urban youth have filtered the language of professional sports through the street vernacular of hip-hop culture. If you're interested in other slang terms derived from pick-up basketball, take a look at The Back-In-Your-Face Guide to Pick-Up Basketball by Chuck Wielgus and Alexander Wolff. Other pick-up sports have produced pithy vocabulary. My bad! has been compared to the volleyball term I go!, shorthand for 'I got it!'

Some people nominated My bad! as a candidate for 1999 "Word of the Year," an end-of-the-year contest sponsored by the American Dialect Society. It was immediately pointed out that the phrase is over twenty years old. However, it was popularized by the 1995 cult movie Clueless, which was, incidentally, a gold mine of teenage slang.

My bad! is only one of the many clever interjections (or exclamations) common in the speech of young people in recent years. For example, the exclamation Not! is a way of saying that the previous statement is untrue: "That's a cute dress. Not!" Another exclamation that became popular in the 1990s is As if!, roughly meaning 'To the contrary; no way!'

The phrase My bad! is probably decreasing in use compared to its popularity in the mid-1990s. However, it's still current slang used in all parts of the country, not just New York City. It's used by young people and even some adults in sports (even professional sports) and in many other non-sports contexts. It's even infiltrated cybertalk as a convenient shorthand expression.

Carol