Rappers love beef — but not for eating

If the news is to be believed (and who could possibly doubt the news?) there is 'shade but not beef' between Tbo Touch and Mo Flava. I was very relieved to hear that.

Shade is when your brother borrows your car keys without asking but brings the car back unharmed. Beef is when he gives your car to a new girlfriend whose name he can't quite remember.

The other day I heard an editor upbraiding a reporter for asking a prominent interviewee whether he "had beef" with another person. "We do not speak hip-hop around here," said the editor.

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Ever since the 2003 documentary Beef, which investigated two decades of bitter feuds between hip-hop artists, the meat from which cows are made has had a bad rap. There have been several sequels to Beef, because there are always new things for hip-hoppers to argue about.

Beef is big. Open any web page dedicated to entertainment news or popular culture and you will find someone having beef with someone else. Some beefs (beeves?) are bloodier than others. 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. had serious beef. Both were shot dead. Curtis James Jackson III, better known as 50 Cent, has beef with almost everyone, even vegetarians.

Musicians might have a hefty stake in beef, but the expression goes back a long way. It used to be married to the indefinite article "a" - if your brother borrowed your carriage and forgot to reattach the horses when coming home from a wayside inn, you might have had "a beef" with him.

Lexicographer Jonathon Green published an essay about beefy arguments on the Quora website. He quotes an anonymous burglar's memoir, published in New York in 1865, in which the burglar states his intention of finding out if an acquaintance was likely to "beef" or not.

It strikes me that the nursery rhyme about Taffy the Welsh kleptomaniac - who was always breaking into his friends' houses and nicking their joints of beef - was popular at around the same time, so he might have something to do with it. Perhaps the anonymous burglar was Taffy? Either way, he used beef as a synonym for "snitch" or "rat on". If someone beefed on you, that would be a good reason to have beef with them.

Green traces the angry side of beef back to "cry hot beef", which in the 1700s was a colloquial way of saying "make a big fuss". The association of beef with anger was embellished in the 1800s, when "hot beef" was adopted into Cockney rhyming slang as a substitute for "stop, thief!". There is a lot of resentment tied up in beef.

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The etymology of the compound word "hip-hop" is much less clear. Wikipedia (and who could possibly doubt Wikipedia?) claims that it was coined in 1978 by the late Keith "Cowboy" Wiggins of the band Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five (whose 1982 single The Message, incidentally, was voted by a Rolling Stone panel in 2012 as the greatest hip-hop song of all time.)

Legend, or possibly rumour, has it that Cowboy made up a scat song containing only the words "hip" and "hop", which sounded like the beat of marching soldiers, in order to irritate a friend of his who had joined the US Army. Whether they had beef afterwards is not recorded.

Others disagree. Writing on the Quora website, muso Mike Offre says hip and hop were random words used by DJs in the 1970s to get a hip crowd hopping. "Before," he says, "the culture didn't have a proper name."

So there you have it. As for shade, well, it's what hot bulls stand in.

• E-mail your observations on words and language to Sue de Groot on degroots@sundaytimes.co.za or follow her on Twitter: @deGrootS1