While “bae” only made its way to mainstream parlance in the last few years, it is a word that most black folk have been intimately familiar with for decades. Its etymology was unclear, but its meanings and nuances are deeply understood in context. “What’s up, bae?” “That’s my bae,” etc., have been ways of staking claim and announcing intimacy between oneself and one’s (sometimes prospective) lover. Bae is also used as a term of endearment and affection for someone with whom there is no romantic involvement or interest (not unlike “honey” or “sweetheart” is used in Southern dialogue), as in “Hey bae, can you pass me that plate?”
And then Pharrell put it in a song, Miley Cyrus did a cameo, and it gained the attention of mainstream media. Suddenly there were articles attempting to define the word “bae”, otherwise reputable businesses began implementing “bae” in their social media ad campaigns, and everybody and they mama started using it. At which point it was declared overused by organs of upper-class white folk media like Time magazine.
Fair enough: white people’s adoption of the term distorted it to the point of misuse and meaninglessness. What was once a word born of the beautifully eclectic black Southern laziness of the tongue and a shortened version of baby, became a catchall term for anything from inanimate objects to food. The reference to affection was consistent but bae was used to describe everything from one’s (desired or actual) significant other to pancakes. “That’s bae”, a student swooned, glancing at a picture of J Cole during a discussion of black masculinity last summer in class. “These cupcakes are bae”, I read in a Facebook post attached to a picture of a delicious-looking dessert not many months later. And just like that, the shelf life of bae in the public imagination expired and the gatekeepers of mainstream language decided that it must be banned.
Cultural appropriation at its best, steals, reduces, overuses and then disposes of words like so much bathwater. The linguist Jane H Hill defines language appropriation as “a type of complex cultural borrowing that involves a dominant group’s ‘theft’ of aspects of a target group’s language.” Hill claims that the ‘theft’ adds value to white identity while further marginalizing nondominant groups. This cultural “borrowing” of black language and phraseology happens regularly, allowing non-black folk to “try on” black culture through the use of African American English vernacular and slang without having to “put on” the cultural consequences of actually being black in a culture conditioned to devalue and dismiss it.
As Hill claims, language appropriation is further problematic because it gives dominant groups control over the language. Dominant groups get to decide, for example, when and if certain words are worth appropriation, when and how the words should be used, and then when the word becomes cliché, overused and therefore passé. And often in the process, as happened with “bae”, the dominant group ends up changing the meaning or pronunciation of words entirely.
The good news is that black language is resilient and black folk are creative. So even when the dominant culture tries to dispose of the terms it wears out, other words and phrases will emerge. We already know some of them. Already you can see terms grounded in communities (“bye Felicia”), disguised in pronunciation (“ratchet”), or invented from imagination (“on fleek”) slipping into mainstream and popular culture lexicons (again). There, they will be mass produced for financial gain (again), and eventually disposed of (again).
So, what happens when mainstream culture decides to dispose of a word stolen from black language and then used to the point of saturation in popular culture? Nothing. The word may lose its novelty so that those who appropriated it stop saying or using it, but the word won’t disappear or lose its utility in the black community. We will go on saying bae. We will say it to our lovers in casual moments at home, and to our children to be endearing. We will say it in the grocery store, at the movie theatre and across church pews on Sunday mornings as a substitute for names. We will say it to each other – as we have always done – lovingly, reverently and mindfully. And with any luck, the word will settle back into its original meaning, sans the unsolicited remix of dominant white culture.