"Bae," Urban Dictionary says, is an acronym that stands for "before anyone else," or a shortened version of baby or babe, another word for sweetie, and, mostly unrelated, poop in Danish. I was headed to the modern equivalent of the classic Oxford English Dictionary – the Internet's infinitely knowledgeable social guide, Urban Dictionary. Similar to the days of yore when I hastened to remedy my initial ignorance of the meaning of NSFW, MCM, WCW, TBT (Nobody shaves for Wendy! Man, cougar, mammoth, woman, cannibal, wallaby-try and be tested!) and the like, I finally buckled. My personal favorite.)ĭespite my efforts, none of these sounded particularly plausible. I then endeavored to fill in the blanks of an acronym that did not exist.īatting All Eyelashes? (Action to accompany each declaration of love?) Brave As (An) Eagle? (Continued American pride in honor of our World Cup performance?) Born After Egalitarianism? (Everybody's got a right to love.) Bacon And Eggs? (Doesn't really make sense, but simultaneously makes tons of sense. Next, in one of my less than proud moments, I thought it might be a new shorthand way of calling someone-affectionately (insofar as a once demeaning term can become affectionate)-a bitch. Maybe this was another way to show she was ruling the world, by adding a letter to her nickname and subtly dropping this into 20 percent of America's texts from boyfriend to girlfriend, full-on NSA style? She is known for her impressive musical riffs, epic hair flips, and power struts, among other things, so this offered a reasonable progression, in my eyes.
When I first saw the word "bae," I assumed, tragically and incorrectly, that it was yet another derivative of Beyoncé. What is this? And why does everyone seem to know about it but me? One day, like you, receding into the depths of the Facebooks and Twitters, I began to see sporadic "I love you bae" and "#BaeBeLike" and "Thanks Bae" and "#BAEcation" messages. I embarked on a small informational quest to find out just why all the kids are calling their kid boyfriends and girlfriends "bae," and I'm still not sure if I know. Really, even the dictionary isn't sure where to go from here.
"Come Get It, Bae" is here to trample your ears at your next barbecue, even though nobody really knows what "bae" is or where "bae" came from. The study of slang is now taken seriously by academics, especially lexicographers like the late Eric Partridge, devoting their energies to the field and publishing on it, including producing slang dictionaries.Here it is, the dawn of "bae," word of indiscriminate origin and now 1/4 of the title in the new Pharrell and Miley Cyrus music video. In recent years, dictionaries with a more academic focus have tried to bring together etymological studies in an attempt to provide definitive guides to slang while avoiding problems arising from folk etymology and false etymology. Grose's work was arguably the most significant English-language slang dictionary until John Camden Hotten's 1859 A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words. Other early slang dictionaries include A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, first published circa 1698, and Francis Grose's A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, first published in 1785. The Canting Academy, or Devil's Cabinet Opened was a 17th-century slang dictionary, written in 1673 by Richard Head, that looked to define thieves' cant. Slang dictionaries have been around hundreds of years. Famous slang dictionaries 17th and 18th centuries