![]() As tends to happen when slang exits the communities it originated from, rest in power now encompasses much more than it was originally meant to. It means that someone’s legacy will last beyond their own life, either through groundbreaking albums or falling in a too long lineage of murdered black trans women. It can mean that a death was somehow wrongful or unjust, whether in a systematic sense, as with the death of an unarmed black man at the hands of police, or in a more everyday way, as with the loss of someone to heart disease or cancer. Rest in power now means that someone has died too soon, but too soon can mean anything from 17 to 75. In some ways, the phrase seems to have gone the way of woke and become a shorthand for multiple competing agendas. Which brings us to our current moment where, in just a week, rest in power was used in digital elegies for everyone from Ocasek to Cokie Roberts to the Notorious B.I.G. Teague beneath the words, ‘Rest in power’ ” and framed by “two black angels.” 29, an article in the Canadian newspaper the Ottawa Citizen described a graffiti memorial for teenage Ottawa murder victim Jennifer Teague that portrayed “a smiling Ms. But by the end of 2005, it had spread beyond Northern California: On Sept. … I’ve never seen ‘Rest in Power’ written as a substitute for ‘Rest in Peace,’ ” suggesting that even then in the Bay Area, the phrase was still new to many. Willis-Starbuck was a student at Dartmouth College, back home for the summer, and in an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, a family friend wrote, “I’ve never seen a tree in Berkeley covered with picture of a 19-year-old girl I knew. The first two instances both appeared in Bay Area newspapers, and both are descriptions of graffiti that emerged after 19-year-old Meleia Willis-Starbuck was shot and killed that year outside her Berkeley apartment. The phrase seems to have originated in the graffiti community of Oakland, California.Īround 2005, the phrase began showing up in print, and in all three examples that Popik dug up, as with “Dream” Francisco, it was used in connection to the Bay Area, graffiti, young victims of violence, or all of the above. The artist’s almost two-decade-long career at the vanguard of the San Francisco Bay Area’s graffiti scene was cut short when he was shot and killed during a robbery, and on the alt.graffiti boards, a contributor identified only as “SPANK” ended his remembrance with the words, “REST IN POWER PLAYA.” 18, 2000, to pay respect to local legend Mike “Dream” Francisco. (The fact that Oakland was also the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a hub for the Black Power movement may or may not be a coincidence.) The first use of this remixed RIP that Popik found was on the newsgroup alt.graffiti on Feb. ![]() It’s often impossible to definitively determine a phrase’s linguistic birthplace, but based on the digging of etymologist Barry Popik, the phrase seems to have originated in the graffiti community of Oakland, California. ![]() What is that history? While the phrase rest in peace has been common for more than a century in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and for more than a millennium in Latin ( resquiescat in pace), the roots of rest in power are much more recent. ![]()
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