A wise woman once said, “I slay, all day.” That woman was Beyoncé.

In the visuals for her 2016 single, she taught the world how to get in “Formation.” While we are forever grateful for her contributions to culture, she wasn’t the first person to coin the term.

Historians believe that the term slay came to be in the 1800s and has origins in Germany. Slay came back in style around the 1920s.

The intersectionality of minority communities gave birth to the context in which the term slay is used today. In the 1970s and 1980s, the term was heavily adopted by the founding queens of ball culture — many of which were Black and brown.

The word became even more widely linked to LGBTQ+ culture after the release of Paris Is Burning — a documentary centered around drag queens living in New York in the 1990s.

With this knowledge in mind, go free and continue to slay the day.