Oh, those saditty gals think they’re all that, don’t they? Saditty, or seditty, goes back to the 1940s, where it first appears in news articles from African-American publications. It applies primarily to women act like they’re better than others, or who seem stuck up. We also talked about saditty in a later episode. Bougie, as in bourgeois, has a similar use among African Americans. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Saditty”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Evita Sawyers. I’m so happy to be on the show with you guys.
Evita.
Hi, Evita. Welcome to the show.
Welcome. Where are you calling from?
Thank you so much. I’m actually calling from Los Angeles, but I live in Chula Vista, California.
Excellent. What can we do for you?
I’m calling today because I was sitting around with a friend of mine, Angela, and her boyfriend, Rick, and we were talking about, you know, just our childhood and stuff like that.
And I used the word sadiddy, and he stopped me and said, sadiddy, what is that?
I’ve never heard of that.
And I said, oh, you know, it’s a term that we use to mean someone is uppity or they think they’re better than everyone else.
And he was floored because he had never heard it, and he asked me how I spelled it.
And I said, to be honest, I don’t know.
I’ve never read it anywhere or anything like that.
It’s just a term that, you know, we kind of always used growing up in my house and, you know, my family members and stuff like that.
And so it kind of got me curious as to where this word came from.
Was it regional?
Because I actually grew up in a Jersey City, New Jersey.
I’m a Jersey girl.
So I was just curious about the origin of this term and, you know, why, you know, a lot of people never heard of it.
Because I really haven’t heard it outside of, you know, the community that I grew up in.
Well, let me ask you, is your friend African-American?
No, he’s not.
He’s a white guy.
And you are African-American.
I am, yes.
The thing about sediti, this is a term that I like to use when I’m giving speeches and public presentations to a variety of audiences.
It is almost exclusively an African-American term.
And when I ask a room who’s heard of this word, none of the white hands go up ever.
That’s so funny.
And most of the African-American hands do.
And not just black, because Caribbean blacks don’t have it, but African-American in particular.
And so you picked it up from your community of people, from your ethnic group, because it totally belongs to you all.
It has a variety of spellings, S-E-D-I-T-T-Y, S-A-D-D-I-T-T-Y, all variations on that same theme.
And it goes back to at least the 1940s when it starts to pop up in some of the conversational newspaper columns of the African-American community.
You can find these in various online news archives.
We don’t know the origin of sadidity exactly, but there are two prevailing theories.
One is that it’s a dialect pronunciation of Saturday.
You may have heard people in the African-American community or even just white southerners say Saturday, right, instead of Saturday.
Yeah, Saturday.
There’s one theory is that a woman is all dolled up to go out.
It’s almost always about a woman, not a man, right?
Oh, wow, I didn’t know that.
I mean, have you ever heard the term applied to a man?
You know, to be honest, now that you mention it, I can honestly say no, that, you know, we would use it to explain a female generally who kind of thinks she’s better than everyone else.
I’ve never heard it used, actually, to indicate that, you know, they’re talking about a male, sometimes about a family.
Like, you can say a family is sedity.
Right.
You know, never an actual guy.
It’s usually about, like, a female or a group of individuals.
Yeah, exactly right.
Interesting.
So it’s the image of a woman all dressed up on Saturday night.
Right.
That’s one theory. The other theory is that it’s a corruption of the word sedate, S-E-D-A-T-E, that it’s like a fake Latin pronunciation of that word, as if the vowels were a little different.
Neither theory has much evidence behind it, but it’s the best that we can do.
I’m so excited to hear you still use this term, because I was worried that it was on its way out, and I think it’s got a really interesting history, and I continue to love to tell the story about it.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, another term, the more popular one that I think I hear nowadays for people using it is bougie.
Bougie, right.
And it’s kind of the same meaning, but I always thought that that came off of like bourgeois.
Exactly.
I don’t know how to pronounce it, so they say bougie.
But that’s what mostly people say nowadays is bougie.
But I’m kind of an old soul, so, you know.
Yeah, bougie does come from bourgeois, and it does mean, at least in the way that we’re using it here, that you are trying to act like you’re better than you actually are.
You’re putting on airs.
Yeah, and there are always going to be people like that, so we’ll always have sedity or bougie or something, right?
Well, cool. Thanks, Avita, for the call. I hope we helped.
Thank you so much. And I love, love, love this show.
I’m a total word nerd, and so I’m in love with you guys.
Oh, thank you. We love you, too.
Right on.
Thanks for calling, Avita.
Good talking with you.
Bye-bye.
Okay, bye-bye, Avita.
Bye-bye.
The sedate origin is really interesting because in one of the newspaper columns, they have the word upsadate, and then they re-spell it immediately right after as upsadity.
Oh, really?
So if you’re upsadate, it means I think you’re calm and collected and very classy looking.
Yeah, yeah, probably.
But it’s all really hard to puzzle out.
You know, these words that, as she just said, she didn’t know how to spell it because it’s transmitted orally.
Yeah, yeah.
And oral transmission means that the history tends not to go with it.
Yeah.
