signifying

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sig·ni·fy

(sĭg′nə-fī′)
v. sig·ni·fied, sig·ni·fy·ing, sig·ni·fies
v.tr.
1. To denote; mean: A red traffic light signifies that traffic must stop.
2. To be a sign or indication of; suggest or imply: The test results will signify how serious the problem is. The surge in housing starts signifies an upturn in the economy.
3. To make known, as with a sign or word: He signified his disagreement with a frown.
v.intr.
1. To have meaning or importance.
2. Slang To exchange humorous insults in a verbal game.

[Middle English signifien, from Old French signifier, from Latin significāre : signum, sign; see sign + -ficāre, -fy.]

sig′ni·fi′a·ble adj.
sig′ni·fi′er n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

sig•ni•fy•ing

(ˈsɪg nəˌfaɪ ɪŋ)

n.
a game or playful confrontation, as playing the dozens, in which witty insults are exchanged.
[1955–60]
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
Translations
References in periodicals archive ?
Other research (e.g., Florini, 2014) highlights African American use of Twitter for "signifyin'" Blackness, which involves "millions of Black users on Twitter networking, connecting, and engaging with others who have similar concerns, experiences, tastes and cultural practices" (Florini, 2014, p.
Donnelly's final chapters are surveys of soundtracks that are essentially compilations of "hip songs" (The Graduate, American Graffiti, The Big Chill, Forrest Gump, Trainspotting, John Hughes and Quentin Tarantino films, etc.) and a brief investigation into the presence (or lack thereof) of Schoolly D.'s controversial hip-hop song, "Signifyin' Rapper," in Bad Lieutenant.
Signifyin' in African American culture (the use of the signifier to
More urgent than the problem of Pussygate for many white Americans, evangelical and not, was the problem of Eve, the original signifyin' woman, and her 21st-century avatar, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
For example, in the context of "BlackTwitter," Brock (2012) argues that, "the signifyin' hashtag invites an audience, even more so than the publication of a Tweet to one's followers, by setting the parameters of the discourse to follow" (p.
Post-modern academics refer to the latter strategy as "signifyin'(g)", which has always been a distinctive rhetorical feature of African Diasporic performance, both secular and sacred.
In the next subsection --"Signifyin' Psychoanalysis and the Rhetoric of Interracialism"--Ahad argues that Messenger editorials, taken as one narrative, support race mixing in order to create a "mulatto nation," invert Freud's argument that blackness "signified a space of willful ignorance or unknowability" and instead present the idea of blackness as the space that shapes "white psyche" and the resultant b(1)acklash of that space.
(24) The phrase "signifying on" of course invokes African American street poetry ("signifyin'") and involves quoting from, repeating, doubling, and extending the resonances of (usually vernacular) words and cultural forms.
Whereas in the first chapter Thaler drew on Hegel, Gilroy, and de Man (among others), here Thaler makes use of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s theory of "signifyin'" as presented in his book The Signifying Monkey (1988).
These "outsider" writers have been very conscious of their marginal, or even oppositional, status relative to a white male canon, and, as a result, the notions of writing back, talking back, revising, signifyin' on, and other forms of dialectical or ironic appropriation have entered the vocabulary of literary history.
Very little discussion of the relationships between the Five Percent Nation and related systems (such as the Nation of Islam and Islamic 0rthodox, and vernacular Signifyin' practices) is offered.