How long is a minute slang

However, I did begin to see a pattern in the infrequent uses where the sense either was, or might be context did not always distinguish , sense 4.

Simply, after the phrase began to be negated , perhaps sometime in the s due to cultural influence from the popularity of The Red Hot Chili Pepper 's hit song "One Hot Minute", semantic drift worked to produce uses of 'hot minute' in sense 4, "a long time", even when the phrase was not negated.

The following quote from a newspaper article clearly illustrates how negation of 'hot minute' produces the meaning, "a long time":. In the phrase "it wasn't a hot minute", "long" or "a long time" can be substituted for "a hot minute" without altering the sense of the phrase. Similarly, if the phrase used had instead been "it was a hot minute", then "a short time" or "soon" could be substituted for "a hot minute" without altering the meaning. So, the quote demonstrates the semantic equivalence of "it was a hot minute" and the negated "it wasn't a hot minute".

That use, and the eleven other uses of 'hot minute' I collected from , strongly suggest that, originally, explicit negation of 'hot minute' produced the opposite meaning. Not all the uses in sense 4 that I collected are explicitly negated but, notably, the earlier uses are either explicitly negated or negated implicitly by a reference to 'a time since [something]'. Chicago Tribune Chicago, Illinois , 19 May paywalled. It's not a rooftop seat. It's a city-top seat.

Chicago Tribune Chicago, Illinois , 25 Jan paywalled. I hadn't seen you in a hot minute! Chicago Tribune Chicago, Illinois , 26 Oct paywalled. Of the twelve uses with meaning approximating 'a long time' that I collected from , seven are explicitly negated. Of the remaining five, two are from and the meaning of 'hot minute' is somewhat indeterminate, one is from , one is from , and one is possibly from Discounting the quote edited in , all but one of the 7 uses I found with the meaning of "a long time" from the first dozen years in the s are explicitly negated.

The meaning of the negated 'hot minute' used in the prevailing sense 3, "a brief window of opportunity", is the obvious "a long time". These observations suggest that 'hot minute' began to acquire the sense of 'a long time' in the decade before the s, and then in the context of the negation of its meaning of 'a window of opportunity, usually but not necessarily short'. Oddly enough, hot minute had one or more prior existences as a term meaning "a moment," as described in J.

Fisger Conjure-Man Can you give the law a hot minute? Lighter has gathered six instances of hot minute from five sources stretched across a year period from to , in which the term seems to imply a short time, not a long one.

Kulp reared up, threw his arms over his head and slumped down. Cramer jumped into his place and lost three fingers off his right hand before he could get her [the mounted machine gun] going, and at that hot minute a mule seemed to kick me contiguous to the shoulder and I sat down like I'd slipped on a banana. After that, I seemed to be looking down from a cloud on everything that happened. So we have a long and fairly continuous trail of usage of hot minute to mean "moment or instant or very short time" across almost a century.

In view of that record, it's difficult—but not impossible— to view hot minute in the sense of "a potentially lengthy period of indefinite duration" as having popped up in ignorance of the long-established but not necessarily widely recognized usage. At the very least, though, we can say that the emergence of a newer sense of hot minute that is sharply at odds with the older sense makes it exceedingly difficult to discern when the newer meaning first appeared—since many people not in the know about the newer sense might well apply the older sense to the term and consequently misread the speaker's or writer's intended meaning.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. See more words with the same meaning: a period of time. Last edited on Aug 16 Your vote: None To vote, click the pepper.

Vote how vulgar the word is — not how mean it is. Logged-in users can add themselves to the map. Login , Register , Login instantly with Facebook. Google has been penalizing this site in its search rankings for years and a Google employee lied about it. Since they have almost killed this site, I am going to start releasing details on Monday August 17 of my conversation with the Google employee who told me about the penalty in secret.

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I haven't seen you in a minute! I will be back in a minute. I was aware of meaning 2 but I didn't know about meaning 1. When I wrote the sentence what I meant was, "Very soon after that, she let the kids go play. Those two meanings of the phrase sound a bit contradictory to me? Thank you very much. Last edited: Oct 13, English - South-East England. Urban Dictionary is written by idiots, mostly. Ignore it. Egmont Senior Member Massachusetts, U. I have never seen meaning 1 and would not understand the phrase that way if I heard it.

I can think of two possibilities: 1. This meaning is used within some communities even though it is not standard or common. Since anyone can submit anything to urbandictionary. Perhaps I write too much. Click to expand Thank you all! Or if I separate it into two sentences?