gammin'

1.

Origin & Attribution

This is Harlem musicians' speech, collected and printed by Cab Calloway, who compiled the first edition of his Hepster's Dictionary in 1938 and kept revising it through a sixth edition in 1944. Calloway was explicit in his foreword that he had not invented the vocabulary: the words 'were gathered from every conceivable source,' many of them first appearing in Billy Rowe's column in the Pittsburgh Courier. That matters, because the pamphlet's fame has a way of collapsing into the claim that Calloway made the language up. He did not. He documented the working slang of Black bandsmen, dancers and audiences moving between the Cotton Club, the Savoy and the touring circuit, and the pamphlet's own claim to being the New York Public Library's official jive reference tells you how quickly white readers took it as a novelty phrasebook rather than a record of somebody's actual speech. 'Gammin'' never crossed over the way 'hep cat,' 'groovy' or 'jitterbug' did — it stayed inside the community that made it and went out of use with the swing era. It probably descends from older 'gammon,' meaning to deceive or put on a show, but that line is not established and should not be asserted as fact.

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Citations & Sources

See also