Entry · catalog no. 1212
storm buzzard
/ /ˈstɔrm ˌbʌzərd/ /STORM buzz-erd
noun · Black Florida and the rural Deep South, carried into Harlem · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
A drifting, shiftless man with no home and no steady work. The image is the buzzard that rides in on the wind ahead of bad weather: something that arrives with trouble, feeds on what is already down, and moves on. Used as an insult it carries contempt, but it also describes a Depression-era circumstance plainly. Hurston recorded a woman using it in Florida as a straight slur against a man who had talked out of turn about her.
“Every payday some storm buzzard turns up at the door talking about how he is just passing through.”
2.
As Hurston set it down in the glossary she appended to her 1942 Harlem story, the word had settled into a character type: the shiftless man with no fixed address who turns up in a street scene and is gone by morning. The Harlem use is the same Southern word carried north by migrants, not a new coinage.
“That corner belongs to two storm buzzards who have not worked a day since the crash.”
Origin & Attribution
Black Southern, documented by Zora Neale Hurston out of her Florida fieldwork. It appears first in Mules and Men, her 1935 folklore collection drawn from Eatonville and Polk County, Florida, where she recorded it in a woman's spoken retort rather than as a lexicographer's specimen. Seven years later she listed it in the Glossary of Harlem Slang appended to Story in Harlem Slang in the American Mercury of July 1942, by which time the word had moved north with the Great Migration into Harlem speech. Green's Dictionary of Slang marks it US Black. The compound takes a Southern rural image and applies it to an urban Depression condition, which is a common shape for this vocabulary and worth naming as such rather than filing the term under generic jive.
1935
Recorded in spoken use during Hurston's Florida fieldwork and published in Mules and Men
1942
Listed in the Glossary of Harlem Slang appended to Story in Harlem Slang
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Black Florida and the rural Deep South, carried into Harlem · 1930s
Spoken by
Black Southerners, especially in Florida, in the 1930s; Harlem speakers by the early 1940s
$STORMBThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical91 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
10/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1935
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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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1935, introduction by Franz Boas; passage at p. 147 of the 1995 Library of America reprint
book · printed
■
Zora Neale Hurston, Story in Harlem Slang, The American Mercury, July 1942, with appended Glossary of Harlem Slang; glossary reprinted in Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, Library of America, 1995, p. 1010
magazine · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceJonathon Green, Green's Dictionary of Slang, digital edition, entry buzzard, n., sub-entry storm-buzzard
reference · online
See also