By the beginning of 1983 the scene that Herc created had scaled to Bambaataa’s ambitious prophecy—a movement with a name, a past, and a future. Just as Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Fats Domino had been pioneers of rock-n-roll even though the music wasn’t called that when they first made it, Herc, Bam, and Flash were now pioneers of hip-hop. It would then be a matter of weeks, not decades, for hip-hop to begin its global takeover.

But if this story tells us why the term “hip-hop” spread, it still doesn’t tell us where it came from.

Certainly the word “hop” had long been linked to Black urbanity, creativity, and modernity—at least since the late 1920s when dancers like “Shorty” George Snowden, Herbert “Whitey” White, Norma Miller, and Edith Matthews had popularized the spectacular and often physically demanding Lindy Hop in Harlem.

A generation of young whites was initiated in 1958, when American Bandstand host Dick Clark made a hit of a white Philly doo-wop group Danny and the Juniors’ “At The Hop.” Clark had asked the group to change the song’s name from “Do The Bop” because he wanted to promote his side-hustle of MCing high school “sock hops.” The change made all the difference. The focus shifted from the dance of the week to all the places the new dances were happening.

In African American youth culture the words “hip” and “hop” together have a long history. Father Amde Hamilton of the influential rap precursors the Watts Prophets once told me that, when he was growing up along Central Avenue in 1950s Los Angeles, the older folks used to call teen house parties “them old hippity hops.” The late Chuck Brown, godfather of D.C.’s go-go scene, said that the weekend youth dances they played at the area churches were sometimes called “hip-hops,” before the term “go-gos” stuck.

As for “hip,” the scholar Clarence Major has linked the word to the Wolof verb hepi (“to see”). “So from the linguistic start,” John Leland wrote in Hip: A History, “hip is a term of enlightenment, cultivated by slaves from the West African nations of Senegal and Gambia.” Hip-hops, we might imagine, could literally be places of vision, and where the masses could feel free to move.

In old school legend the origin of “hip-hop” goes back to the days when rapping was really about MCing, the lost art of moving the crowd. In the days before “Rapper’s Delight,” the primary job of an MC was to keep the crowd engaged, whether through his call-and-response chants or unique rhymes by which they might remember him.