"Bath-ing""

[Wilson Gray]

Thanks, Chris!

-Wilson


On 1/9/06, Chris Waigl <cwaigl at free.fr> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Chris Waigl <cwaigl at FREE.FR>
> Organization: sadly lacking
> Subject:      Re: "Bath-ing""
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Mon, 9 Jan 2006 22:11:03 -0500, Wilson Gray typed:
>
> > Is this true?
> >
> > A friend of mine from Ipswich, England, once told me that, in the
> > Mother Country,  "bathing" [beiDIN] no longer refers to taking a
> > bath. Rather, it refers to spending time at the beach. If you want
> > - or, rather, if one wishes - to refer to taking a literal bath,
> > the verb to use is "bahthing" [baTIN].
>
> I only had one BrE speaker available right now (it _is_ a bit late
> over there), so for what it's worth... He's from the South-East
> somewhere, btw. His report:
>
> - bathing, pronounced [bEiDIN] is an "archaism" for "swimming" and
> mostly survives in "sun-bathing"
> - bathing, pronounced [baTIN] is how he'd pronounce the transitive
> verb, as in "bathing a baby"; this "sounds wrong" intransitively (in
> the sense "taking a bath"), but he might use it "playfully"
>
> He added: "If I were feeling Edwardian, I might say 'when I was
> bathing this morning' (AY) in the same kind of way I would say
> 'during my ablutions'; or if I needed it for an acronym or
> a rhyme or something."
>
> Chris Waigl
>