Are you hip? Is your car a whip? AAE is everywhere.

The MoJo Daily newsletter, Monday through Friday. [View in browser]( [Mother Jones Daily Newsletter](     September 16, 2022 I've got a few questions for you all. Have you ever used the word "whip" to describe your car? If someone is being a total snob, would you call them, "boujee?" When you hear the word “basic," do you think of pumpkin spice lattes and UGG boots? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you're probably one of three things. 1. A person who spends a lot of time on Tik Tok 2. Hanging out with a person spending a lot of time on Tik Tok 3. A person who grew up speaking African-American English What's African-American English or AAE? I’m so glad you asked. Basically, AAE is a dialect of English that was created by Black people in the United States. While studies around the language are fairly recent, many [linguists have recognized]( AAE as its own form of communication in the Black community, with its own unique set of grammatical rules and vocabulary. I'm sure at this point you’re asking, "Arianna, why are you talking about AAE? This is a newsletter, not a linguistics lesson.” Well, I’m talking about it because a lot of people don’t even know that AAE exists, at least not in the capacity of it being its own dialect. Plenty of people think that AAE is just "slang" or "improper English"—but it's not. And now with social platforms like Twitter and Tik Tok, these misconceptions have grown stronger than ever. People appropriating AAE is nothing new. [Words like "jazz,"]( "banjo" and "hip" all originated as AAE before eventually being absorbed into the public lexicon. However, the digital landscape has made it so much easier for these words to be adopted, only for their origins to be erased. Recently, a social media management [company was criticized](for claiming that words like "boujee," "swole," and "drip" were created by teens, even though the history of these phrases existed long before Gen Z existed. But like I said, the digital appropriation of Black culture is not a new phenomenon. But this week, we published Morgan Jerkins' excellent [piece](, "Black or Bot: The Long, Sordid History of Co-opting Blackness Online" where the New York Times bestselling author and professor broke down how Russian disinformation trolls appropriate AAE and pretend to be Black online for their political gain. I'm still thinking about this piece and encourage you to sit with it this weekend, too. —Arianna Coghill Advertisement [House Advertisement]( [Top Story] [Top Story]( [Black or Bot? The Long, Sordid History of Co-opting Blackness Online]( Trolls and foreign agents love to exploit African-American culture for political gain. BY MORGAN JERKINS [Trending] [The truth about those viral Tweets questioning the Omicron boosters' safety]( BY KIERA BUTLER   [What the hell is going on at the Los Angeles County jail?]( BY SAMANTHA MICHAELS   [Greg Abbott bused thousands of migrants from Texas to DC. What happened after they arrived?]( BY ISABELA DIAS   [Far north on the BC coast, Indigenous guardians patrol their ancestral wilds]( BY ASHLEY STIMPSON Advertisement [House Advertisement]( [Special Feature] [Special Feature]( [Report: US Intel Officials Believe Russia Secretly Backed Albanian Candidate]( Mother Jones reported Russian links to the Democratic Party of Albania in 2018. BY DAN FRIEDMAN [Fiercely Independent] Support from readers allows Mother Jones to do journalism that doesn't just follow the pack. [Donate]( Did you enjoy this newsletter? Help us out by [forwarding]( it to a friend or sharing it on [Facebook]( and [Twitter](. [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. To change the messages you receive from us, you can [edit your email preferences]( or [unsubscribe from all mailings.]( For advertising opportunities see our online [media kit.]( Were you forwarded this email? [Sign up for Mother Jones' newsletters today.]( [www.MotherJones.com]( PO Box 8539, Big Sandy, TX 75755