idioms - Etymology of ~Getting into someone's “kitchen”~

Popular in the 80s and early 90s in Black-American culture, but I doubt it made it into many books so we may be at a loss.

The meaning, quite visual, is walking into someone's house and banging all the pots and pans and making such a huge racket that it startles and disturbs the homeowner to distraction. It's simply a more colorful way of saying getting into someone's head.

Often used in sports. Like before a boxing match with trash-talk, or the stare-down. There are numerous ways for me to “get all up in your kitchen” if we are to do battle.

But there are also countless ways to phrase it, so I find it hard to search for a specific idiom when it's more about a series of uses where kitchen=head/mind. But it's always about gamesmanship.

I don't suppose there can still be some understanding of when this form was first used, or if there is some other idiom that sired it.

For example, I always thought “gat”, as slang for gun, originated similarly in the 1980s, but then I saw various 1930s gangster movies that used the term. (Gatling gun; at one point gangster slang for all guns.) I'm curious if this kitchen business is likewise long and storied.

Answer

The Historical Dictionary of American Slang quotes the 1989 edition of Paul Dickson's Baseball Dictionary for the definition of kitchen:

The area of a batter's torso inside or at edge of the high and inside portion of the strike zone....

This is the target area for a brushback pitch, one intended to force batters away from the plate. The pitch is not intended to hit the batter but to be close enough to force batters away from space they've claimed as their own, space metaphorically like their own kitchen. The HDAS goes on to state

The term is used in more elaborate metaphors: "He got in his kitchen and broke a few dishes."

A brief search in references and the google does not reveal whether this is the origin of the "trash talk."