weight champion boxer Muhammad Ali was renowned for his clever rhymes and cocky toasts, but one of the greatest influences on the style rap lyrics was the urban street jive, a form of coded speech that developed in the black community back in the 1920's. Jive speakers disregarded standard usage of the English language and replaced common words with their own substitutions. Popular Jive alternatives include "cat" for man, "crib" for home, "axe" for instrument, "scrub" for loser and "player" for successor. David Toop suggests that such substitutions "have enabled many blacks to share messages that only the initiated can understand. " This form of linguistic encoding was a universal survival tool for African Americans during times of slavery, and many traces of these techniques of communication can be seen in the language used by African Americans today. Evidence of this is made obvious through popular American "talk shows" such as "J
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