Tanya Ballard Brown, “How ‘Sassy’ Came To Mean Something Both Sweet And Sour” (NPR’s Code Switch blog, Aug. 31, 2014)
Ben Zimmer, executive producer of vocabulary.com and language columnist for The Wall Street Journal, tried to help me trace “sassy” back to the big bang moment when it split from “saucy” and we couldn’t quite pin it down. But he did point me toward To Make Our World Anew: Volume I: A History of African Americans. In it, Peter H. Wood suggests that the West African word “sasi” may have influenced the development of the word.
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