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Originally posted by Cruel World
Good for her! Honestly don't really know what it means tho since English isn't my first language
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Bama has two major strands of meaning. The first is straightforward: it is an abbreviation of the name of the U.S. state of Alabama, used to refer either to the state itself or to sports teams representing the University of Alabama. Bama was being used in this way by the early 1920s, and that use continues to the present. But by 1970 a new meaning had emerged, especially in the Washington, D.C. area: Bama (also spelled Bamma, and often with a lower-case initial) was being used to refer not to a place, but to a person, specifically ‘a rustic; an “un-hip” person’ (1970 Current Slang Fall, p. 5). That first citation comes from a list of slang terms reported by black students attending the University of South Dakota but hailing from a number of cities, including D.C., and so presumably represents a word the informants had been familiar with back home. The use of Alabama as a byword for the South generally was established as early as the 1940s in New York, and in 1966 black high school students in Washington, D.C. were said to be using the phrase ‘bama chukker as a disparaging term for ‘a southern white rustic’, but we don’t have enough evidence to say for certain when Bama alone began to mean ‘hick’.
The cultural background of Bama’s new meaning was one of the most significant population shifts of American history: the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the North and to southern cities, making southern-born black people an increasingly large proportion of the population in many urban areas, including Washington, D.C. Bama was originally intended as an insult, but it came to be embraced by some southern natives living in D.C. as a self-designation. In 1978, D.C. City Council member Douglas E. Moore, a native North Carolinian activist and minister, referred to himself as ‘a ‘bama from North Carolina’ (1978 Washington Post 24 Aug. 10/1), and in the early 1980s, a D.C. radio station featured a weekly show called The ‘Bama Hour which celebrated the ‘Bama label. Nonetheless, in a newspaper article about the radio programme, one African-American interviewee claimed that ‘a ‘Bama is the worst thing you can call a black man in this town’, while another lamented about ‘the ‘Bama image of blacks’.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, Bama began to spread more widely, but remained chiefly in African-American use; it was used as an insult in the script of the Spike Lee film School Daze, set on the campus of a historically black university. The word also began to take on a more general connotation, as both a noun and an adjective, of ‘unfashionable or unsophisticated’, but not necessarily with specific reference to being from the rural South: ‘I love men in Levi’s. Not Lee, too boxy. Not Wrangler, too Bama’ (1996 Benilde Little, Good Hair p. 30).