It's all good

Posted by RRC on November 03, 2008 at 14:18

In Reply to: It's all good posted by R. Berg on November 02, 2008 at 16:21:

: : : My son brought "It's all good" home a few years ago. He uses it as an expression of 'happy resignation' or faith? Like ... If I said to him, "Oh Ben, I get so worried about money." He would say, "Ah Ma ...it's all good." I've heard it other places used in a similar way. Just wondering who said it first. Also ... the word "not" used as in ..."she sure is pretty ...NOT." Was that from a movie. ALSO ..."My Bad" in taking responsibility for a trespass.

: : I can't be much help. But here is what I know. I first heard "It's all good" in 2005 in the U.S. Don't know the source. "...NOT." Wasn't that a punchline, maybe from Saturday Night Live? "My bad" is here: www.phrases.org.uk meanings my-bad.html Seems like I read a newspaper article that gave University of Kentucky basketball players (Go Big Blue) credit for that phrase. But I don't seem to have saved the evidence.

: I saw somewhere that ". . . Not!" came from programmers' code, in which you negate something by expressing it as a positive statement--asserting the proposition you want to deny--and putting "NOT" at the end. Can any computer wizards out there confirm this? ~rb

I don't know of any programming languages that have a postfix boolean negation operator. If there is one, it's not one of the popular ones, so it seems unlikely.

• Not ESC 04/November/08