America still has much to learn from drag queens—gender being a social construct, for example, or the perils of hog body—but there’s one aspect of drag culture that has long since moved into the mainstream, and that’s the slang. Chief among these linguistic gifts is a new, many-layered meaning for the word “shade,” a concept that has been part of black culture since slavery but has only now been added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, according to a tweet sent out by Merriam-Webster earlier today. Here’s the official dictionary definition of ”shade”:
“Shade” was first defined on film in the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning; in the film, Dorian Corey, a legendary New York drag performer and mother of the House of Corey whose Harlem apartment was found to contain—no shit—a mummified corpse upon her death in 1993, explains the concept thusly: