Entry · catalog no. 1257
lightly, slightly and politely
/ /ˈlaɪtli ˈslaɪtli ənd pəˈlaɪtli/ /LYT-lee SLYT-lee and puh-LYT-lee
phr. · Harlem, New York City · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
Doing a thing perfectly: with ease, precision, and none of the effort visible. The rhyme is the point — the phrase performs the quality it describes.
“He took that whole solo lightly, slightly and politely.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem musicians and entertainers of the 1930s and 1940s. Zora Neale Hurston printed it in her Glossary of Harlem Slang, appended to Story in Harlem Slang in the American Mercury of July 1942, glossing it as doing things perfectly. It was already circulating among players before that: Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary carries muggin' lightly and politely inside its entry for trickeration, and a separate entry for muggin' — a musician's term for how a thing is executed, light and staccato, before it was a general word for doing anything well. Which edition of Calloway's booklet first carried it is not settled, so the archive dates the phrase to the citation it can see.
1942
Printed in Hurston's Glossary of Harlem Slang (American Mercury, July)
1944
Present in Calloway's dictionary under trickeration and muggin'
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Harlem, New York City · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem musicians and entertainers
$LIGHTLThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant84 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
14/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1942
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
■
Zora Neale Hurston, "Glossary of Harlem Slang" (American Mercury, July 1942)
1942
■
+ Cite a sourceThe New Cab Calloway's Hepster's Dictionary: Language of Jive
1944
See also