"Shev-uh-lay"

Wilson Gray wilson.gray at RCN.COM
Thu Jun 23 13:48:37 UTC 2005


That's hip! I'm forced to admit that our East-Coast brethren are, at
least in this case, superior to their Missouri cousins WRT wordplay. We
said "SHIV-uh-lay," despite the presence, in my youth, of a Chevrolet
plant in St. Louis. The standard pronunciation was totally ignored and
the plant was referred to as "SHIV-uh-lay Shell." The short form,
"Shivvih," was just as common. I recall the baby sister of one of my
partners pronouncing this as "Shippih," whenever I find myself wanting
to doubt that voiceless stops are less marked than voiced continuants.
The short of choice was the '39 Shivvih, which cost about $200.00 in
the middle '50's.

-Wilson

On Jun 23, 2005, at 8:16 AM, Margaret Lee wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Margaret Lee <mlee303 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Shev-uh-lay"
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> 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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