Here's the One Term You *Have* to Know for LGBTQ+ Pride Month

What does "slay" mean? It's Pride Month, and you want to enlarge your LGBTQ+ vocabulary. Here's a short lived history of the word and its meaning.

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world nowadays. And in accordance to the internet, English is one of the toughest to be told.

Subject-verb agreement and semicolons have had linguists in a chokehold for decades. But even Webster couldn’t faculty you on the semantics of the urban dictionary. In it lie the solutions to existence’s hardest questions.

As of this writing, Pride Month is easily underway. If you or any individual you love is a part of the LGBTQ+ community (or watches RuPaul's Drag Race), there are a couple of phrases you should get acquainted with. If you’re asked, “what’s the tea?” leisure confident that they don’t mean chamomile. And if somebody tells you to slay, you better just do that.

But what does slay even imply?

What does slay mean? The term is everywhere TikTok.

Context is key, and this is very true when it comes to breaking down what it actually way to slay.

Despite the term’s murderous implications, the instruction is in reality an enormous praise to the individual receiving it. Per Dictionary.com, slaying way doing “something spectacularly well.” Used in a sentence, one may say, “Yasss! You slayed that outfit, queen.”

As speakers of the English language neatly know, the word has many meanings. Along with meaning “to violently kill,” the verb additionally manner to make someone giggle. On the different hand, in Africa, calling any person a “slay queen” — or by translation, a golddigger — is beautiful insulting.

But where did the term at first come from?

The term “slay” dates all the long ago to the 1800s.

A smart lady once said, “I slay, all day.” That lady was once Beyoncé.

In the visuals for her 2016 single, she taught the world how to get in “Formation.” While we're perpetually grateful for her contributions to culture, she wasn’t the first person to coin the term.

Historians believe that the term slay came to be in the 1800s and has origins in Germany. Slay came back in style round the Twenties.

The intersectionality of minority communities gave birth to the context by which the term slay is used as of late. In the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties, the term was closely adopted via the founding queens of ball culture — many of which have been Black and brown.

The word turned into much more extensively related to LGBTQ+ tradition after the unlock of Paris Is Burning — a documentary centered round drag queens living in New York in the 1990s.

With this knowledge in mind, cross free and proceed to slay the day.

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