ma

slang For sure; definitely; absolutely. The phrase is a stylized variant of "for sure, my nigga." Though it originates in African-American vernacular, the phrase is often used by people of other ethnicities as a kind of parody of hip hop language or culture that can be considered offensive. A: "Yo, you going to the party tonight?" B: "Fo shizzle, my nizzle!"

Only state exactly what happened, without embellishment or exaggeration. The phrase is often attributed to the character Sergeant Joe Friday from the 1950s TV show Dragnet. Despite popular misconceptions, Friday never said this exact phrase. All right, whoa, just the facts, ma'am—when did you start hearing the strange noise? A: "He's a two-timing fool!" B: "All right, just the facts, ma'am. What caused your dispute?"

A jocular name for AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation), originally a subsidiary of the Bell Telephone Company, especially in reference to its monopoly of phone services across the United States and Canada up until 1981. (Its regional subsidiaries, which it was required to divest in 1982 as the result of an antitrust lawsuit, were known as "Baby Bells.") My dad worked for Ma Bell for nearly 40 years as an engineer. If the merger goes through, Ma Bell will once again control nearly all of the telephone operations across the entire country. There were few complaints from people working within the company, though, especially at the corporate level—Ma Bell certainly took care of her own.

Rur. a bump in the road. We hit a wham bam thank you ma'am and lost one of our hubcaps. Watch out for the wham bam thank you ma'am at the corner of Third Street.

Don't embellish your story. Many expressions moved from a movie or television program to popular speech, but none more quickly than a misquotation (as it turns out) of a lines by Sergeant Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb on the 1950s TV series Dragnet. With his deadpan expression and staccato speech, Friday enthralled the public; Dragnet was one of the highest-rated drama series of the decade. At least once in every show, viewers heard Friday tell a female witness, “Just the facts, Ma'am.” Except they didn't. He might have said, “Give us the facts, ma'am,” but he never uttered the four-word phrase. No matter, because the phrase swept the country in a wide range of contexts. If you wanted to be thought of (if only by yourself) as clever, you interjected “Just the facts, Ma'am” delivered in a Friday voice in a question or request. Oh well, Humphrey Bogart's character Rick in the movie Casablanca never said “Play it again, Sam” either.