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Keep your English up to date
Bling
Professor David Crystal
Bling, bling – it arrived in English in the late 1990s, used
to describe diamonds and jewellery and all kinds of showy
clothing, accoutrements …
Well, it became nationally known in the USA when the
artist Baby Gangster - Cash Money artist - made a hit hip-
hop song called 'Bling Bling'. And it soon arrived in Britain,
where it was more usually used without the reduplication,
you know, 'bling', by itself. It was in dictionaries by 2002.
Well, the sound-symbolic character of the word - glistening
light reflected by metal - it caught popular attention.
The
Times
ran an article on it. It was the title of a novel by
Erica Kennedy, and its sense began to broaden as people
began to use the word in new ways. There's a website,
'Think Bling!' defining it as 'anything shiny and worth a
good amount of money'. Cars can now be bling.
And even that definition is passé - a rich meal can be bling. 'Bling
Breakfast' was the headline of a newspaper article in New York a couple
of years ago.
But the word's takeover by the middle-classes has made it worthless to
the rapping community. My rapping contacts tell me – they'd never use it
now, except as a joke!
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