The Good Dis

It came into common usage sometime during the 1970s or 1980s. It seems to have come from the music genre known as hip-hop. As with many slang expressions, it caught on like wildfire. Dissing. To dis someone is to belittle or disrespect them. It’s one of the more painful experiences we know as sentient beings. The origins of the expression, however, reach way back in the history of human language, traceable to a Latin prefix.

When it’s attached to another word, considered to be the root, it means the opposite or reversal of that root. We get that, don’t we? When someone disengages from a conversation, they go silent. If we disagree with another person’s opinions, we hold the opposite sentiment. When we are in a group of people and there is tension and conflict present, we might describe the experience as disunity. At its core, the prefix means to separate. Gosh, that makes sense, doesn’t it? Little wonder its slang origins latched onto this. To disrespect someone is to separate themselves from us as if we are other than. Above them. Apart from them. Unwilling to have anything to do with them. If we’ve ever been on the receiving end of that stance, it hurts.

It’s possible, though, that there is a good side to this prefix, dis. If the root word to which it is attached is a negative or destructive thing, to dis it – separate from it or reverse it – can be a very wonderful thing. What if human bodies could all be healthy and functional, free of disability? What if the nations of the world would choose peace and the preservation of life through disarmament? Can we imagine human life on this planet if no one – not a single person – had to be displaced without safe shelter? Let’s just pick a few -isms and dismantle them, shall we? Racism. Sexism. Ageism. Elitism. See? There is a good side to dissing!

The difficulty is, of course, who gets to say what gets dissed. We could gather just a handful of others of our kind into a room and it’s likely we’d experience disagreement over the kinds of things from which we need to separate. Could we not distribute the resources of the earth more equitably? What would happen if we were to disentangle ourselves from a culture of consumption? Might we all benefit from dissing dissing?

In the marvelous exercise of our personal freedom and individual agency, we can choose for ourselves from what we will separate and what we will seek to reverse. Some might disown us. We could know discomfort. But what a gift it could be to employ the good dis!