Originally Posted by roachboy

i was thinking q-bert, who coined the expression in the mid 1990s to differentiate more underground, skill-heavy dj practices from what has become mainstream. right about the time that copyright-infringement-suit happy people were driving dj practices underground. if mainstream hip-hop blows now, these lawsuits are a big reason why. go american copyright law!

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The origin of the terms Turntablist and Turntablism are widely contested and argued about, though over the years some facts have been established by various documentaries (Battlesounds, Doug Pray's Scratch), books (DJ Culture), conferences (Skratchcon 2000) and interviews in online and printed magazines. These facts are that the origins of the words most likely lay with practitioners on the US West Coast, centered around the San Francisco Bay Area. Some claim that DJ Disk, a member of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, was the first to coin the term, others claim that DJ Babu, a member of the Beat Junkies, was responsible for coining and spreading the term Turntablist after inscribing it on his mixtapes and passing them around. Additional claims credit DJ Supreme, a UK DJ and producer for the group Hijack, though the claims that the terms were birthed in the Bay Area are the most widely acknowledged and established ones. The truth most likely lies somewhere in between all these facts.