Once a year, elementary and high school students across Washington D.C. and environs dress up for "Bama Day." But you'll only see them in a University of Alabama national championship shirt if it's too big, or too small, or if it has holes in it or something. Because the whole point of Bama Day isn't to celebrate the Crimson Tide, it's to look as tacky and ridiculous as possible -- you know, like a bama.

D.C. native John Stanton, 43, has been trying to avoid looking, sounding, or acting like a bama as long as he can remember.

"When we were kids, (Family Matters character Steve) Urkel was like the definition of (a bama)," says Stanton, a former Washington Bureau Chief for Buzzfeed known for his frequent use of the term. "He had no style.



"But it's been around since before I was born, for sure. The roots of it, from what I've heard, is that it goes back to maybe even like the '30s, when black folks were moving up to the cities from the South during the Depression. They moved to D.C. to be with family or whatever, and you could pick them out because they were like hayseeds or whatever, and people started calling them bamas."

That's the same etymology endorsed by Smithsonian historian John Franklin, who in 2010 told Washington City Paper that "bama" was, as the word suggests, most inspired by migrants from the Heart of Dixie.

Over the past decade, "bama" has gained currency enough not only for an Urban Dictionary entry ( "Slang, typically used in the D.C. metropolitan area, meaning uncool") but also Washington Post articles highlighting its current catchall status in D.C. patois.

So how do you use it in a sentence?

"This bama is tripping. Yung, stop acting like a bama. Dude that's some real bama s--- you did," says Carl "Kokayi" Walker, a D.C. based Grammy-nominated producer and emcee.

"Its uses are vast," Walker says. "It's popular because it's pliable and super colloquial."

To Stanton, former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell acted like a bama a few years back.

"In D.C. we call that being a bama," Stanton told then MSNBC host Abby Huntsman in a 2014 roundtable discussion on the scandal-stricken McDonnell. Stanton went on to describe McDonnell's decision to accept thousands of dollars in improper gifts as "classic bama behavior."

A clip of Stanton's appearance on the show was quickly posted to Instagram by Stars and Bars, a D.C.-based clothing company. Their best-selling product? A T-shirt bearing the words "Don't Be a Bama," which the company began printing in 2013.

The term occasionally even pops up outside the beltway. People were described as "bamas" in a 2003 episode of the critically-acclaimed Baltimore-based HBO crime drama The Wire. More recently, it can be heard in the lyrics to the 2016 Beyonce hit "Formation."

But Stanton insists "bama" "really got huge in D.C. when Huggy Lowdown started using it on the radio."



That would be D.C. comedian Huggy Lowdown, whose "Bama of the Week" is a popular segment (that dates at least to 2005) on the Tom Joyner in the Morning show.

Constant "use of the word Bama" topped a 2015 Buzzfeed article titled "31 Ways You Know You're DEFINITELY a DC Native."



Recent Auburn grad Amalia Otero, Executive Services Manager at the Air Force Association, has only recently moved to the D.C. area. But if Buzzfeed is right, she might as well have lived there all her life.

Otero, like many Auburn fans, frequently uses "bammer" as a derogatory designation for Alabama fans -- and for the same reasons her fellow District denizens might label someone a bama.

"A Bama," D.C. journalist Rend Smith wrote in 2010, "is a fool, a punk... someone who simply doesn't get it."



It makes perfect sense, Otero says.

"I move to the one city where this term to knock someone is how we refer to my pure enemy?" she laughs. "I was like, how did that work out?"