Entry · catalog no. 1256
syndicating
/ /ˈsɪndɪkeɪtɪŋ/ /SIN-dih-kay-ting
v. · Florida and the Gulf South · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
Gossiping; running other people's business from porch to porch. The image is of a story being distributed the way a newspaper syndicate distributes a column — the same item appearing everywhere at once.
“She been syndicating all up and down that road since Sunday.”
Origin & Attribution
Southern Black vernacular, collected by Zora Neale Hurston in her folklore fieldwork and printed in her essay Characteristics of Negro Expression, published in Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology in 1934. Hurston lists it among the metaphors and similes she gathered, in a run of figures drawn from Florida and the Gulf South rather than from Harlem. It is a good example of what she was arguing in that essay: that Black speech works by taking a thing from the wider world and bending it into a picture.
1934
Printed in Hurston's Characteristics of Negro Expression
1997
Reprinted in Sweat, ed. Cheryl Wall (Rutgers)
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Florida and the Gulf South · 1930s
Spoken by
Southern Black speakers recorded by Hurston
$SYNDICThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant92 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
1934
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
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," in Negro, ed. Nancy Cunard
1934
■
+ Cite a sourceZora Neale Hurston, Sweat, ed. Cheryl Wall (Rutgers University Press)
1997
See also