I bought the new laptop about a month ago on a visit to a consumer electronics store. While fighting up commissioned sales people so that I could actually make a decision about what we really need, Annabel and I examined one particular laptop. There was a corpulent kid of the 16-24 age range next to us.
"DUDE!"
I turned to look at him. He's holding up the mouse that's attached to the laptop in front of him. It was very small, like it came from a litter of days-old computer mice.
"I gotta get me one of these!" he said to me, as if I should share in his joy of his discovery. I nodded all Seattle, polite and yet cool.
Then he said something that is still rattling around my head weeks after I heard him say it.
"THIS IS TOTALLY DA BOMB!"
The first time I heard "da bomb" as a synonym for "excellent" was 1995. I was tutoring an African-American kid in the Rainier Valley. I think it was the third thing out of his mouth first time I met him. No one in Boulder ever used "da bomb" to describe anything but thermonuclear weapons. (This is because Boulder has a black population numbered in the ones.) After I heard this kid say "da bomb," it seemed like everyone was using it as an adjectival phrase. In fact, one could argue that its time as a popular figure of speech had long passed; it now has the coolness of a K Car.
And that's why it's still rattling around in my brain. Was this mouse-holding kid trying to fit in with a figure-of-speech from the pre-Monica, pre-blog, pre-Britney era? Did he even know that it was cool to drop that phrase into polite conversation back ten years ago, not now? Is it that African-American language takes that long to percolate into Caucasian-American phraseology?
I didn't know what to say to him. "'Da bomb' is so '95, dude" was too impolite. I stayed with my Seattle insularity. "Yes."
He dropped in another "da bomb" as one of the 14,000 commissioned proselytizers to help him find his very own micelet salvation. I stood there and watched him waddle off. 16? 17? 18? That would make him 6, 7, 8 in 1995. The kid I tutored was 10 in 1995, and he lived in a different universe from this mouse-lover. Yet, they may well have lived less than a mile apart. Seattle is like that -- the poor are just a few streets over from the rich.
One of the sales evangelists alighted next to me and handed me his business card as if I needed to know the Four Computing Laws. I gave it to Annabel. She chewed it to bits. He got the message.
Comments
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"Da bomb" was popularized in '95 because of the movie 'Clueless.' It'd been lurking on the outskirts of the lexicon for a year or so before that, but once that movie came out, it was everywhere.
Posted by: samantha | March 13, 2005 03:09 PM
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Or maybe he figured he'd get his mouth washed out with soap if he said "the shit" instead.
Posted by: Tara | March 15, 2005 01:41 PM
