the dozens - definition and examples of playing the dozens

the dozens - definition and examples of playing the dozens Definition: A game of put-downs: the rapid, ritualistic exchange of insults, often targeting family members. The rhetorical contest of playing or shooting the dozens (also known as capping, ranking, and sounding) is most commonly practiced by young Africans and Observations, below. African-American Vernacular EnglishBdelygmiaCursingFlytingHyperboleInvectiveName-CallingSignifying Examples and Observations: Your mamas so FAT, after she got off the carousel, the horse limped for a week.Mos rebuttal: Your mamas so skinny, she can hula-hoop through a Froot Loop.Your mamas so FAT, her blood type is Ragu.Mos rebuttal: Your mamas so skinny, she looks like a mic stand.Your mamas so FAT, instead of 501 jeans she wears 1002s.Mos rebuttal: Your mamas so skinny, she turned sideways and disappeared.Your mamas so FAT shes not on a diet shes on a triet. What yall eating? Ill try it.Mos rebuttal: Your mamas so skinny, I gave her a piece of popcorn and she went into a coma.Your mamas so FAT, when she jumped in the air she got stuck.Mos rebuttal: Your mamas so skinny, you could blindfold her with dental floss.(Monique Imes and Sherry A. McGee, Skinny Women Are Evil: Notes of a Big Girl in a Small-Minded World. Atriz, 2004) A Game of InsultsThe dozens is usually played by two young black males, often surrounded by an interested and encouraging audience of peers in which the players insult and provoke eac h other with put-downs of each others mother or other female family members. This process teaches one to take insults in stride while encouraging verbal retorts. . . . The dozens is played more often and more intensely in urban ghettos where frustrations are greater and the strategies of the ghetto are appropriate in a zero-sum game; neither player really wins. The dozens works when the players share a common ethnicity, a degree of connectedness, and acceptance of the activity for what it isa game (Bruhn and Murray, 1985).(John G. Bruhn, The Sociology of Community Connections. Kluwer Acacademic/Plenum, 2005) A Rite of PassageAlan Dundes found that the social and artistic are infused in the Afrodiasporic practice of the dozens, which he notes functions both as an assertion of masculinity and as a rite of passage for the secular mastery of words. The dozens not only establishes a framework for verbal creativity; children also use them to determine a social hierarchy. A good dozens player not only cooly withstands merciless insults to his family; he also twists memorized insults quickly to suit the opponent at hand.(Ali Colleen Neff, Let the World Listen Right: The Mississippi Delta Hip-Hop Story. University Press of Mississippi, 2009) An InoculationWhile retaining the form and spirit of the West African original, African-American dozens has elaborated the witty one-liners into complex verbal war games involving huge armories and modes of attack and defense undreamt of in the homeland. It is a case of Darwinian adaptation for survival of the species in the killing jungles of slavery and ra cism. The mother remains the central figure. By learning to deal with verbal abuse of her, the modern black youngster learns to endure the historical, real-life abuse. It is as if the system is inoculated with virtual (verbally imagined) strains of the virus, thereby gaining immunity and new health in spite of the reality on the ground.(Onwuchekwa Jemie, Yo Mama! New Raps, Toasts, Dozens, Jokes, and Childrens Rhymes From Urban Black America. Temple University Press, 2003) Also Known As: sounding, signifying, ranking, capping, hiking, snapping, playing the dozens