One thing remains certain: rap can be tracked through phonology, and the way that phonologies and pronunciations shift and influence one another based on place and point are all ripe for dissection. The speaker does, after all, enunciate a General-American English “you” as opposed to the dialectical “yuh” or “ya.”Īn unintentional mispronunciation that sounded cool, an example of a subtle Queens dialect, a deliberate shift to emphasize “you” – the phrase can be explained rigorously but still remains a mystery. It’s plausible that “bond” is made out to be “bone” because the transition to “you” is a lot easier. In all likelihood, Nas’ opener was the anomaly, and maybe this variation happened on an individual basis. From East to West, there seems to have been a phonological consensus that “bond” is “bon” in rap-game AAVE. A moody track from Joey Bada$$ off of Summer Knights called “ Word Is Bond” has the Brooklyn native pronounce “bond” like the Wu Tang Clan, “bon.” Furthermore, the song that Bada$$ samples from Big L and 2Pac, “ Deadly Combination,” includes pronunciations of “bon” as opposed to “bone,” and these pronunciations are anything but anomalies. “Bond” is somehow allowed to rhyme with “phone.”Ī semblance of an answer may be found if we shift the timeline closer to the present day. In this case, both “n” and “d” are voiced consonants (there are vibrations for both), and by the rules of AAVE, RZA is allowed to drop that final “d” to turn “bond” into “bon.” But as far as I can tell, Nas’ opening line changes a bit more than just consonants. The opening line in Nas’ “One Love,” likely delivered by one of his friends, changes the pronunciation of “bond” to “bone,” and this morphological difference is highly unusual.Ī much more predictable and common transformation of the word “bond” is in the form of “bon.” Consider the third-to-last line in RZA’s outro for “ Wu Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta Fuck Wit“: “Peace to the fuckin’ Zulu Nation / Peace to all the Gods and the Earths, word is bond.” The master beatsmith pronounces it “ bon,” not “bond.” In African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), it is common to encounter consonant cluster reduction for pairs of consonants that share voicing (whether or not there are vibrations in your throat when making the sound). The saying’s semantics and lexical past are fascinating at all, but what really strikes me is the phonics of the phrase. Implies that your word is as good as the truth and shall not be broken unless you want to get smoked.” As one Urban Dictionary contributor put it back in 2003, the phrase is a “common term used among gangstas in the rap game. It resurrects Five-Percenter imagery, and this quality became so appealing to hip hop artists that the phrase soon became primarily associated with rap. Through Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and the Wu Tang Clan, the phrase has been carried by some of the biggest, boldest names in rap’s history. The Zulu Nation took up the linguistic torch in the late 1970’s when Afrika Bambaataa re-popularized the term to deepen connections with a mythic Five-Percenter past. The saying is an abbreviation of the biblical snippet – “my word is my bond” – and sure enough, it was popularized by the Five Percenters. To my surprise, I came across the written phrase “Word is Bond!” in a book by Geneva Smitherman, who defines it as an “affirmative response to a statement or action, popularized by the Five Percent Nation.” I was a bit disappointed that Nas’ phrase wasn’t the much more visually interesting “Word is bone,” but I started to dig around a bit more into the phrase’s history.

The first time I heard the phrase “word is bond” I thought it was exactly what it sounded like: “word is bone.” Bone? I rationalized that “bone” was just a truncated version of a much longer word (trombone, backbone, wishbone, etc), perhaps with some symbolic significance to honesty and trust – the basic definition of the phrase. Nas’ “ One Love” opens up with a phrase in medias res: “Word is bond you got six millions on that jack hero, shit is real.”

5 percenter sayings word is bond