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Just listened to this podcast and I had to comment. I'm from Southern California, so influence from Spanish is something that I am definitely used to. I'm white, my first language is English, and I was born and raised in Southern California. Until listening to this podcast I never even considered that the phrase "do you want to get down?" used to mean "do you want to come in?" would be odd to other English speakers. Everyone I know would readily understand and use that phrase here.
"Hell to the No" -- Grant explained the use of "to the" for the rhythm, but didn't mention the actual words. Why "to the"? I never heard this expression before, but I had an immediate way of understanding it that made sense to me. But given the cultural context it does seem far-fetched:
In math, you say "ten to the third" or "ten to the power of 3" to mean ten times ten times ten. Grant called spelling out a word "a form of rhetorical emphasis." Likewise, you might call "to the" an intensifier. And that's what raising something to a power does; it's an extreme form of intensification. (When people say "it's growing exponentially", with only the vaguest understanding of what "exponential" means, what they mean is "a whole lot.") "Hell to the No" seems like an imaginative variation on the math expression. You don't normally expect high-school math to figure in street lingo, but if Grant's right that this may come from black preachers (who love to talk about power), maybe it's not too much of a stretch?
On the other hand, when I searched this page for "to the" I got a lot of hits.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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