From Amazing Grace to A Floating Opportunity

An old Southern term an African-American mother uses to describe an long and sometimes well deserved, ass-whooping in order to warn her child, or others who cross her. This African-American saying, used as a motherly warning, first popped up in the 1930 play Mule Bone by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

“You’d better behave, or I’ll knock you from amazing grace to a floating opportunity!”