When “It’s Been a Minute” Means “It’s Been Quite a While”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Michelle, and I’m calling from the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania.

The turn of phrase that I’ve most recently been hearing, and it’s new to me, and it just might mean that I don’t talk to enough people, is it’s been a minute. When the reality is it’s really not been a minute, so I kind of find it funny and cute and whimsical. And I’m not really sure where that comes from and kind of how it even started.

Yeah. How would this come up in conversation?

So if I’m speaking to someone and I say, have you gone on to this website? And they’ll say, oh, no, it’s been a minute. And then I’ll say, okay, well, does that mean you’ve not been on the website? And they’re like, no, I haven’t been on in like months. I’ll be like, okay. So it’s just kind of a funny turn of phrase that I’ve most recently experienced. And I thought it was interesting because it’s so opposite of what exactly is happening. So are they trying to be ironic? I don’t know.

Yeah, so it’s longer times than a minute. So you might say, I haven’t seen you in a minute, meaning I haven’t seen you in a while. Or you might say, I’ve been working overseas for a minute, meaning I was overseas for some months. Or it’s been a minute since you came back home, meaning it’s been years since you came back home. It’s a while or an uncertain amount of time or a long time.

And it goes back to at least the 1970s in Black American language. And it reached mainstream American English by the early 2000s. And the first uses that we know of in print are really interesting. And they show you how it came to be the opposite of what it is. Because they were something you’d say as you’re heading out the door. You’d say in a minute, meaning it’s kind of a promise that you’d be back soon, like see you soon. Because we would say see you soon as you’re leaving out the door, right? Even if it wasn’t really going to be soon, even if we knew it might be years, we might say see you soon as a promise, as a kind of a vow to return. And so that farewell of in a minute kind of turns around a little bit and later shows up in the conversations to mean an unknown period of time or a long time.

Very interesting.

Okay, so it’s just a different, it’s like what, colloquial phrase or something like that.

Yeah, it’s definitely slang. But yeah, it shows up in Black American English first. It takes several decades to pop up in the slang of college students by the early 2000s. And then it’s more broadly used these days as it started to show up in movies and TV and just picked up in the broader American culture.

And we’d be remiss if we failed to mention the NPR show It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders. It’s a wonderful show about news and culture. And on their website, they say It’s Been a Minute is another way of saying let’s catch up.

It’s been a minute, Michelle. What’s been going on?

Look at that. I love how you rolled that in. You are so good.

Thank you, Michelle. I’m glad somebody noticed.

Michelle, where do you hear it’s been a minute? What do you do that you run across this phrase?

I’m an RN, and I do work with a very large African-American populace, and that’s generally who does say that. I’ve never honestly heard it from white Americans or even Hispanic, Latino, Latinx. It’s generally usually your African-American population, so that’s really cool. It’s a cultural thing, and I feel included.

Oh, there we go.

Yeah. You have a good ear for language then.

We’ll call us sometime if you hear something else that you can’t quite place.

You got it.

Absolutely. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Michelle. Be safe on the front lines out there.

Thanks.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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