Entry · catalog no. 1276
say it with your chest
/ seɪ ɪt wɪð jɔːr tʃɛst /SAY it with yor CHEST
verb phrase · Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; national · 2010s
✓ Verified
1.
Say the thing out loud and fully, with your whole body behind it: no mumbling, no hedging, no leaving yourself room to deny it later. Usually a dare — you clearly have something to say, so commit to it and take what comes. Sometimes approving: he said it with his chest, meaning he stated an unpopular position without flinching.
“If you got something to say about my people, say it with your chest.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American. The chest element is considerably older than the sentence: Green's Dictionary of Slang records get chest and go chest as US Black slang for looking for a fight, first attested in Hermese E. Roberts' The Third Ear: A Black Glossary in 1971, and again in Sanyika Shakur's Monster in 1993; it also has "I'm chest not breast" as US Black teen speech from 1962. The chest is the seat of nerve. Kevin Hart put the fixed phrase in front of a national audience in his 2010 special Seriously Funny, quoting his uncle, recently home after fifteen years in prison — and the joke in the bit is that Hart did not know what it meant, which is itself evidence the phrase was already moving in that world. Crediting Hart as coiner is almost certainly wrong, and treating it as generic internet or Gen Z speech erases a documented Black lineage running back to the 1960s.
1971
The Third Ear: A Black Glossary records get chest — to look for a fight
1993
Sanyika Shakur's Monster uses the chest idiom of prison-yard conflict
2010
Kevin Hart's Seriously Funny puts the full phrase in national circulation
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The Northeast
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; national · 2010s
Spoken by
Black American speakers nationally; heaviest online
$SAYITWThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising16 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
84/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2010
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
@bxgriot
The Bronx, NY
@phillyanne
Philadelphia, PA
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Hermese E. Roberts, The Third Ear: A Black Glossary — glossary · 1971
submitted
■
Sanyika Shakur, Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member — memoir · 1993
submitted
■
+ Cite a sourceKevin Hart, Seriously Funny — stand-up special · 2010
submitted
See also