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The 44-year-old singer sometimes refers to black people as "spabooks," the magazine said

I'm sorry, what?

Just when you thought it couldn't get weirder....

Living in south Ga, I thought I had heard just about every racial slur out there. I was wrong.

What the heck is a spabook?

http://www.aa-aha.org/spabooks.htm

Spabook is from a kids' language that I grew up knowing as Double-Dutch, taught to me by my older sisters, in the New Orleans area. It's similar in nature to Pig Latin.

Spabook = Spook

This comes from the website http://www.africana.com/articles/alist/bw20030314urkel.asp

Wubacked ubout pubedubophubile

Haven't read, seen or heard enough bizarre stories about Michael Jackson? Us neither! That's why we quite literally ran out to buy the April issue of Vanity Fair which, besides dissing Denzel, (see A-List item #3), also contains a lengthy exposé on the alleged precariousness of MJ's finances, sanity and nasal organ. Among the article's many, many WTF?! moments, the one that particularly struck us was the revelation that little Michael Jackson regularly denigrates other black people using his own personal racial slur — "spabooks."

Now, maybe it was the recent passing of Mr. Rogers, or maybe it's the particular brand of spring fever that sets fire to the A-List's collective brain each year about now and leaves us as antsy as a schoolgirl (44 days and counting!), but for some reason that one-word window into Wacko Jacko's complex matrix of internalized racism/self-loathing tickled something in the part of the A-List's brain that stores memories of kiddie TV.

Last week the A-List asked, "what the hell exactly is the derivation of spabook?" a question that rattled around in our heads all week along with the word itself — spabook, schwa sound, roughly rhyming with "cahoot" — until out popped the time-misted memory of a younger, more innocent A-List lying on a shag rug with our siblings, soaking up television rays while watching PBS's Zoom. And then it hit us: "spabooks" is none other than the curiously retro slur "spook" rendered in Ubbi Dubbi, the Zoomers' native tongue!

For those of you too young, old, or unlucky to have been edutained by the kid-produced public television show, Ubbi Dubbi is like a post-hippie Pig Latin, a lingua franca for Zoom fans looking to talk over, under or past their parents' comprehension. Translating English into Ubbi Dubbi is easy — you just insert the syllable "ub" before each new vowel sound in a word. For example, "Michael Jackson" becomes "Mubichubael Jubacksubon," whereas "spook" becomes "spubook," or, in the case of Vanity Fair's hearsay transcription "spabook!"

Another pressing cultural mystery solved by the A-List! (And you better believe it: Michael would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for us meddling kids!)