Death of the Ghetty

Picture this: it’s a Friday night in 2013, someone just forwarded you an unfamiliar address, and before you know it you’re rolling up to a random house somewhere in an inconspicuous South Florida neighborhood. You arrive to a handful of people lounging around a sticky outdoor table, sipping on room temperature Four Lokos.

Whose house is this? And who are these people? Who knows! This, as South Florida’s Gen Z fondly knew it, was the ghetty.

Ghetty (or getty) can be loosely defined as a small-ish house gathering – anything from a group of acquaintances passing around a joint in a backyard to a game of beer pong inside someone’s garage. While it was definitively more chill than a normal party, it’s not the same as a kickback, and is certainly not as raucous as a banger, rager, or day-ger.

The slang term once populated Gen Z group chats and social media feeds alike, at one point making it on the “Definitive Guide to Miami Slang.” But as one tracker of SoFlo phraseology recently noted in the r/Miami reddit, the word seems to have fallen out of favor as of late. So has “ghetty” gone the way of extinct South Florida-endemic slang (see: OPC [open crib], jit, or on fleek)?

User u/Darkness8779 wrote that they were recently hanging around some Gen Z family members when they realized that today’s youth no longer use the term to describe house parties.

“When did the word Ghetty stop being used in Miami?” the commenter asked, promoting nearly 90 replies.

“Gen Z here and we don’t have parties like those anymore,” one person replied. “I would hear about those parties when I was young…. They sounded so fire.”

“I remember it from high school,” another wrote. “Damn it’s been over 10 years since I’ve heard that word,”

“Holy shit, I still use that word. Am I old now?” a third asked.

While one user explained that they never used ghetty to describe a house party – but rather a small group of friends – another responded: “Yeah no. Getty was used to describe small get-togethers and parties.”

It’s unclear where the word originated, or where the “h” came from. According to Google Trends, searches for the term “ghetty,” a word once spouted from California to Florida, have decreased precipitously since 2004. Unsurprisingly, all of the searches for the term in Florida have originated from the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area.

One Urban Dictionary entry from 2004 defines ghetty as “a small get together of people without major organization.” Another term, spelled ghetti, is defined as a “chill hang out where people smoke and drink and all good vibes.” Getty is defined as a “get-together; a party; a cook-out.”

If “ghetty” and its variants are gone for good, rest assured, their spirit will be carried on by youths “vibin'” when the night calls for something more tranquil than getting “lit.”