Entry · catalog no. 5752
hack
/ /hæk/ /HAK
noun · Baltimore, Maryland · 1950s
✓ Verified
1.
An informal, unlicensed cab: an ordinary person in an ordinary car who picks up riders for a price agreed before the trip starts, no meter, no medallion. The word covers both the ride and the driver, and it takes a verb — to hack is to drive one, and to catch a hack is to flag one down, usually with a raised index finger at a corner or outside a supermarket. In Black Baltimore it has functioned for generations as real transit: groceries home, elders to appointments, children to school, in neighborhoods licensed cabs would not serve.
“Bus wasn't coming, so I caught a hack outside Mondawmin for eight dollars.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Baltimore built the practice because the licensed trade would not serve Black neighborhoods and would not stop for Black riders — hacking is an ordinary Black response to an ordinary refusal, the same problem that produced gypsy cabs in New York and jitneys in Philadelphia. The word is a local reversal: hack, from the hackney carriage, has meant a licensed cab or cabman in American English since the eighteenth century, and Baltimore turned it to mean the opposite. Local scholarship and oral testimony place the practice from roughly the middle of the twentieth century. The archive records 1991 as the earliest verified printed use of the Baltimore sense and states plainly that the practice is older than the receipt rather than backdating the citation to match the tradition.
1991
The Baltimore Sun reports on hacks working near neighborhood stores, 2 January — earliest printed use verified
2013
Berkeley Planning Journal publishes "Hacking: The Informal Transportation System in Baltimore"
2016
Malcolm Rio's "Black Mobility Matters" sets hacking against Uber as a long-standing Black Baltimore commons
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Baltimore, Maryland · 1950s
Spoken by
Black Baltimoreans — drivers working corners at Mondawmin, Broadway, and neighborhood shopping strips, and the riders who depend on them
$HACKThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Falling35 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1991
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.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
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Citations & Sources
■
"Illegal taxicabs are busy in Baltimore: 'Hackers' find trade is lively near stores," The Baltimore Sun, 2 January 1991
newspaper
■
"Hail at Own Risk," The Baltimore Sun, 15 September 2009
newspaper
■
"Hacking: The Informal Transportation System in Baltimore," Berkeley Planning Journal, The Urban Fringe, 2013
planning journal
■
+ Cite a sourceMalcolm Rio, "Black Mobility Matters: An Exploratory Study of Uber, Hacking, and the Commons in Baltimore," Architecture_MPS 10(4), 2016, pp. 1–27
peer-reviewed article
See also