When a New Word Catches Fire
My last post turned into a little celebration of Black joy and words nobody had heard until somebody decided they needed to exist. Anita gave us “sittage,” which somehow opened the door to “tittich,” “bosoming,” and “ninny meat.” A newly created word or expression is called a neologism, and every living language produces them. Some disappear quickly, while others spread through families, neighborhoods, professions, or entire communities until they become ordinary speech. Dictionaries usually arrive later. So when people create a word that everybody instantly understands, they are not necessarily damaging language. They may be doing exactly what speakers have always done: making language fit the life they are living.
Why Black Language Keeps Creating
Black communities have had an enormous influence on American language, although I would not describe that creativity as some biological or racial gift. African American Language is a systematic language variety with its own patterns, and Black speech differs across regions, generations, classes, and communities. Across the African diaspora, language has carried identity, humor, resistance, belonging, and cultural memory. It helped people stay connected while living through slavery, segregation, migration, and displacement. It also changed through contact with other languages, creating new forms of expression across generations. Black linguistic creativity appears not only in vocabulary but also in grammar, pronunciation, rhythm, meaning, and style. Expressions created within Black communities regularly enter mainstream American speech, sometimes after their origins have been forgotten. What I hear is not people failing to use language correctly, but people shaping language to express their own lives.
Survival, Identity, and Play
I also do not want to explain every Black expression through oppression. Black people create language because we can be funny, playful, observant, dramatic, inventive, and simply enjoying one another. A word may emerge from survival, but it can just as easily come from a kitchen table, church hallway, barbershop, family gathering, song, joke, or conversation. If I explain every part of Black creativity only as a response to suffering, I give suffering too much credit. Language also grows from intimacy, community, music, storytelling, teasing, and the pleasure of playing with sound. What is especially striking is that Black linguistic creativity has influenced American culture enormously even while Black ways of speaking have often been treated as inferior. Sometimes language has helped us survive, and sometimes, thankfully, we were just having fun.
Neurodivergence Belongs in the Conversation Too
Neurodivergence adds another interesting layer, but creating new words by itself does not mean someone is neurodivergent. Children, writers, comedians, families, and communities invent words all the time. Research has found unconventional language and neologisms among some autistic speakers, and newer work encourages researchers to consider whether those expressions may be meaningful and creative rather than automatically treating them as deficiencies. Still, that does not justify calling word creation a general neurodivergent trait. Neurodivergent Black people naturally contribute to Black language and culture, but their presence should not become an explanation for the creativity of an entire people. Human language grows from many minds, histories, experiences, and communities meeting one another.
Summary and Conclusion
What began with a funny word points to something larger about how language lives. Neologisms are part of every living language, and Black communities have been especially influential in shaping American speech. That creativity comes from history, community, identity, resistance, humor, intimacy, and joy—not from some mysterious racial ability. Neurodivergent people participate in that creativity too, although inventing words is not evidence by itself of neurodivergence. Language ultimately belongs to the people using it, and dictionaries usually follow rather than lead. Somebody has to say the strange new thing first. And if “sittage” ever makes the dictionary, Anita deserves at least a footnote.