Entry · catalog no. 0002
fraughty issue
/ ˈfrɔti ˈɪʃu /FRAW-tee ISH-oo
noun · Harlem, New York · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
A grim piece of news or a bad situation — trouble that has already landed. Used for the thing itself, not the feeling about it: the eviction notice, the cancelled gig, the hard-luck story somebody is unloading on you.
“Rent went up and the gig fell through — that's a fraughty issue.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem jive of the swing years, printed in 1944 in two independent glossaries in the same year — Cab Calloway's and Dan Burley's. Burley was a Black newspaperman at the Amsterdam News and the Defender who wrote from inside the language, which is why his listing carries more weight than a second-hand reprint. The phrase is widely dated to 1938 online; that date is not supportable, and the "1938 Hepster's Dictionary" circulating on the web is in fact the 1944 sixth edition.
1944
Printed in The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary
1944
Printed independently in Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive
1960
Used in running prose, unglossed, in Sara Harris's They Sell Sex
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem musicians, entertainers and the jive-talking crowd around them
$FRAUGHThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Faded82 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
18/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1944
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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The Bronx, NY
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Philadelphia, PA
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Citations & Sources
■
The New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive — Cab Calloway, 1944
text · glossary
■
Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive — Dan Burley, 1944
text · glossary
■
+ Cite a sourceThey Sell Sex — Sara Harris, 1960
text · cited
See also