Madonna’s song and video for “Vogue,” which came out the same year as the film, were lifted directly from competitive ball culture. “Vogueing,” as one drag queen explains in “Paris Is Burning,” is “like taking two knives and cutting each other up, but through a dance form” — in other words, a joyful and even more stylized expression of shade. Madonna’s appropriation of the idea definitively marked the migration of shade from the grimy, cramped ballrooms of 1980s Manhattan into the mainstream. Soon, “shade” became a trend, a word co-opted to signal inside know­ledge of underground urban culture. In 1991, this magazine had a fashion spread titled “Throwing Shade,” which featured Naomi Campbell dressed in bomber jackets and catsuits, a style it called “the new black,” whatever that was.

Shade is currently having another moment, in no small part because of the ascendancy of the African-American vernacular in both popular culture and digital media. Perhaps the most famous avatar of shade right now, aside from the star of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” is the character Cookie Lyon, the star of Fox’s hit show “Empire,” played by Taraji P. Henson. Cookie, the ex-wife of a music mogul, is a fiercely proud, no-nonsense matriarch whose talent for delivering withering looks and devastating one-liners — “The streets ain’t made for everybody, that’s why they made sidewalks” — is unmatched on television. (A Google search for the words “Cookie,” “Empire” and “shade” results in almost half a million hits.) But shade’s most fertile terrain is the quippy, contentious milieu of social media, which prizes bursts of verbal virtuosity. In fact, shade is best served in small amounts: “If you go back to the tradition of the dozens, these were all short rhetorical structures that were designed to thrive in a sentence or two at best,” says the poet Saeed Jones, who is also the literary editor at BuzzFeed.

On the Internet, a complex grammar has developed around shade, retaining much of the pleasure and humor of its older iterations but with wider-reaching effects. Take the subtweet: a tweet objecting to something someone else has said or done without actually using that person’s name. It’s the digital equivalent of talking trash about someone at a dinner table without ever acknowledging the person’s presence. Another shade-throwing tactic is to annotate a social-media outburst with stage directions like “*sips tea*” or “*side-eye*,” as if to say: “I’ll just sit back and demurely drink this beverage while I watch you act a fool and debase yourself.” Shade may be most delightfully expressed through emoji — crying faces (your predictability and pitiful intelligence make me weep), googly eyes (that assertion was so absurd it exploded my brain), emergency-vehicle sirens (alert: We have a live one here). Emoji are so innocently goofy that they make for the ideal shade delivery system, allowing a person to publicly and blisteringly respond to other people’s commentary without, you know, being blistering about it.

Like the drag balls where shade thrived, hip-checking people online can be a competition, and when lots of people are fighting for approval and attention — Facebook likes, Twitter follows, Instagram comments — some of them will start to get sloppy. Jones laments the way in which the “haute-couture rhetoric” of shade has been cheapened “into ready-to-wear,” explaining that shade actually “requires a really critical reading you can’t do casually.” He adds: “I think when most people talk about shade, they’re describing being mean.” True artists of shade have a smoldering quality, an assuredness that flashes in the eyes and ignites in the body. You can trace a direct lineage from New York drag queens, aggressively flaunting their style and sass on the makeshift catwalk, to a provocatively dressed Beyoncé posing on the Met Gala red carpet, clutching her long blond ponytail in a gesture that simultaneously conveys both sexual ecstasy and queenly indifference. It would be a shame if shade, like other African-American art forms that have been taken up by mainstream culture, became diluted, its meaning encompassing any and every insult and attempt at one-upmanship. But maybe that’s inevitable. “It’s absolutely in line with the tradition of American culture realizing that black people have figured something out,” Jones says, with just a hint of, yeah, shade.