Our weekend discussion on facebook made us smile a little bit, and we couldn’t help but think a little more about the terminology of “bling bling”. So with a quick search on the wonderful world of Wiki, we have been successfully able to define what bling is, where it came from, and how it’s used:
Bling-bling (or simply bling) is a slang term popularized in hip hop culture, referring to flashy or elaborate jewelry and ornamented accessories that are carried, worn or installed, such as cell phones or tooth caps. The concept is mostly associated with rappers.
In linguistics terms, bling is an ideophone intended to evoke the “sound” of light hitting silver, platinum, or diamonds. It is not onomatopoeia, because the act of jewelry shining does not make a sound. The form bling-bling is a case of reduplication.
Rapper Lil Wayne once claimed to have “invented” the word one night in the studio. However, this particular ideophone was already in use some 35 years earlier; and was in usage in rap songs such as Slick Rick’s 1988 single, “Mona Lisa.” During the mid- to late 1960s, toothpaste maker Ultra Brite ran a series of commercials stating, “Ultrabrite gives your mouth…[ping]…sex appeal!” Before the words “sex appeal”, a bell sound was heard as a young man or woman smiled. Comedians such as Martin Lawrence parodied the “Ultrabrite smile” by vocalizing the sound effect as both “bling-bling,” and “bling-blauw.” The term was used in this way to describe a gaudy piece of jewelry, for example the otherwise rotten gold-toothed smile and stereotypical pimp jewelry of the character “Jerome” on the television series Martin. Jesse West(known as rapper 3rd Eye) is cited as perhaps the first rapper to use the complete term “bling bling” on Super Cat’s 1993 hit “Dolly My Baby (Remix)” – a song that West produced, and also featured Puff Daddy and a young Biggie Smalls in his record debut. The term was further popularized in 1999 when the song “Bling Bling” by rap artist B.G. featuring the Cash Money Millionaires cracked the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100; the chorus of the song featured a young Lil’ Wayne rapping “Everytime I come around your city bling bling; Pinky ring worth about 50 bling bling; Everytime I buy a new ride bling bling; Lorenzos on Yokahama tires bling bling.”
While the specific term bling was first popularized in the hip hop community, it has spread beyond hip hop culture and into mass culture. It was added to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 2002 and to the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2006. Companies such as Sprint and Cadillac have used the word bling in their advertisements. During a 2008 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade in Jacksonville, Florida, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney admired a baby decked in dress attire with gold jewelry and said, “Oh, you’ve got some bling-bling here.” 
In 2004, MTV released a satirical cartoon showing the term being used first by a rapper and then by several progressively less “streetwise” characters, concluding with a middle-aged white woman describing her earrings to her elderly mother. It ended with the statement, “RIP bling-bling 1997-2003.” In 2005, the rapper B.G. remarked that he “just wished that he’d trademarked it” so that he could have profited. Like many cases of once-exclusive vernacular that becomes mainstream, the views of the originators towards the term have changed significantly over the years. On VH1′s Why You Love Hip-Hop, rapper Fat Joe stated, “rappers don’t call jewelry ‘bling’ anymore, we just call ‘em “diamonds”.”
So there you have it… We have just expanded our knowledge of urban jewelry terminology.
