There are 95 words defined on NBA.com’s glossary of basketball terms. That’s a wildly abridged list to begin with, and that doesn’t even begin to factor in all the slang associated with the hardwood. The league’s official website has a separate glossary of those as well. Slang is something that tends to vary not only geographically, but also on an interpersonal level. And it’s something that evolves organically over time.
So basically, it’s nearly impossible to keep up, and in many cases, that’s precisely the point. Developing your own private language is by nature a more or less clannish endeavor designed to strengthen the familial bonds and alienate outsiders. It’s also usually very funny…at least to the people who are in the know.
James Harden is an enigmatic superstar. With that audacious facial hair, a decidedly gaudy sartorial sense, and a wholly uncompromising playing style, he is a fiercely independent individual. So it’s no surprise that he and his inner circle have basically developed their own private language. Via Pablo S. Torre of ESPN.com:
In their vernacular, for instance, the noun chug means woman. (“We gonna invite some chugs?” is a typical question.) The adjective fa’lo, meaning excessively flashy, derives from Buffalo, as in Buffalo wings, as in heat. The expression sah-dah-tay, signifying agreement, is actually just a catchphrase from the 2001 film Pootie Tang. That this all sounds impossible for some outsider to decode on the fly is, in fact, the point. “I don’t even try, man,” says Akili Roberson, Harden’s older brother. And for a famously hirsute NBA superstar who cannot plausibly disguise his identity — or his swelling affection for public life — the benefit of a secret language seems self-evident.
We can’t really see this being useful information for anyone, aside from fans, teammates, coaches, family members, potential groupies (i.e. “chugs”), or rival players who might want to get creative with their trash talk. He and his entourage might have to adapt and evolve linguistically now that certain of their vocabulary words have become public domain, but that shouldn’t be hard for someone with his flair for the absurd.
