yayo

Yayo was originally used as slang for cocaine in Latin America, although it’s not clear how the term came into being. One possibility is that it comes from Yayo, the nickname of notorious Dominican drug trafficker Santiago Luis Polanco-Rodriguez. Of course, it’s also possible Yayo was nicknamed after his product.

Many English speakers were introduced to the slang term through the 1983 movie Scarface. Al Pacino, as drug kingpin Tony Montana, refers to coke as yayo several times throughout the movie, including in one scene where, leaving a deal gone bad, he tells one of his accomplices “Chichi, get the yayo” before chasing down his would-be killer. Because priorities.

Legend has it that Al Pacino ad-libbed the term, having picked it up while learning Cuban Spanish for the film. Debbie Harry sang “Rush, rush to me yayo / Buzz, buzz, give me yayo” in a song for the movie soundtrack.

Like so many things related to Scarface, yayo quickly caught on in hip-hop. In 1985, Grandmaster Melle Mel rapped about it in his song “Vice:”

Talk about ya-yo, uhh, it’s everywhere you go
They said in Miami it’ll never snow
Now it’s snow in the palm trees, snow on the sand
It snows all day, for sixty dollars a gram

By the 1990s, yayo was sometimes shortened to yay or lley. The 1992 South Central Cartel song “Ya Want Sum A Dis,” for instance, features the boast: “I run game, and I slang lley.”