"Shev-uh-lay"

[Dennis R. Preston]

When I was a kid in the Louisville area, a common phonetic pun on
Chevrolet was the mock interrogative "(does) she-ever-lay."

Margaret's interesting post suggests wedge-fronting, although
southern back-vowel fronting is more often studied with reference to
the tense vowels, but some of our acoustic work on southern vowel
formants turns up as much fronting of lax /u/ ("good") and wedge as
well.

dInIs

>When I was growing up in southwestern Virginia, African Americans
>jokingly used 'Chevrolet' to mean *shove*one foot and *lay* the
>other, that is, to walk, many times the only option to get from
>point A to point B when there was no transportation available.  You
>simply 'drive your Chevrolet.'
>Any memory of this in your experience,  Wilson?
>
>Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>>In Jim Croce's "Rapid Roy", there is a line which refers to "a dirt-track
>>demon in a '57 Chevrolet". Croce quite clearly pronounces the last word
>>without an 'r': "shev-uh-lay". (I'm not up on asciified IPA; sorry.) I don't
>>recall hearing that pronunciation anywhere else. Has anyone on-list? If
>>so, where (geographically or socially) does it occur, and are there other
>>examples of dropped syllable-initial 'r'?
>>
>>Jim Parish
>
>But is the /r/ really syllable-initial? I think it's not so much the
>dropping of a syllable-initial /r/ but the simplification (natural
>enough, especially in fast/colloquial style) of a /vr/ cluster, which
>facilitates resyllabification as [SE.v at .'le] (Or maybe the /v/ ends
>up phonetically as ambisyllabic? My phonetician colleagues are out
>of town.) I can imagine "everybody" undergoing the same
>simplification, resulting in "ev'ybody" or "ev'abody", despite the
>fact that we might regard the underlying form as involving a
>syllable-initial /r/ there as well. And how about "average" as
>['aev at j]?
>
>Larry
>
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--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages
A-740 Wells Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: (517) 432-3099
Fax: (517) 432-2736
preston at msu.edu