Editor's Corner

Six years ago, I wrote about the phrase “It’s been a minute” meaning “it’s been a while.” The research I found for my original article steered me away from its history and directed me toward a “New York minute,” a “hot minute,” and a Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song One Hot Minute.

More recently, I learned differently from A Way with Words and a little Google™ Gemini research. From A Way with Words:

…Why would we use a phrase that usually means “sixty seconds” for a period of time that might actually be much longer? This slang meaning was first recorded among Black Americans in the 1970s and later adopted by college students before spreading into mainstream culture. Sam Sanders, who hosts National Public Radio’s It’s Been A Minute, has described the phrase as a way of saying “Let’s catch up.”

Google™ Gemini agrees that it’s a feature of the Black community in the U.S. from the 1970s, and goes on to say that it “likely” evolved from:

…(A)n older, related phrase: "in a minute." In the mid-20th century, saying "I’ll see you in a minute" or "I’ll get to that in a minute" was often used as a casual farewell or promise to return. Over time, that casual use of "minute" to represent an indefinite chunk of time flipped around to describe the time that had already passed ("It’s been a minute").

The remainder of Gemini’s report mentions “a hot minute,” which dates to mid-1800s England and meant a brief, intense moment. When it came across the ocean to America and traveled into the late 1900s, Americans changed the meaning of “a hot minute” to be a long time.

Somewhere in those years, Black Americans dropped “hot” from the phrase, and it went from “It’s been a hot minute” to “It’s been a minute.” Skip ahead to the 2000s, and the mixing and mingling of cultures on college campuses brought the idiom to the youth, and then the general public.

I hope this revision has given credit where it is due!

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | KE – Documentation

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