Prescriptive Linguists

[Wilson Gray]

Good one. "Mishoe"? Pronounced "me SHO"? I have friends spell it
"Michaud" and "Michaux."

My late father used to say, "I ain't got me but one real tooth in my
head [heijId], but I can still chew steak and look at me some young
girls [g^l'z]."

Better than liking him looking at some goats, I reckon.

-Wilson

On 1/30/08, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Prescriptive Linguists
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 5:16 PM -0500 1/30/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
> >Well, it does kinda, sorta depend upon what you're accustomed to
> >hearing. When I was in the the Army, a fellow GI, a white native of
> >Darien, Connecticut, and a Stanford dropout, was flabbergasted to hear
> >a white, Southern cook tell him to "git you a tray." He couldn't
> >believe that such a sentence could be spoken by any native speaker of
> >English. "'Get you a tray'?! 'Get you a tray'?! What the fuck kind of
> >English is that?!"
> >
> >It sounds fine to me. I wonder what he would have thought of the black
> >DJ who commented, "I'm jus' sittin' heah, eatin' own me a hamboiguh"
> >or the blues line, "I laid down las' night, thankin' about me a mojo
> >hane," abstracting away from the phonetics, of course.
> >
> >-Wilson
>
> Or cf. the title of the following talk on the construction:
>
> Sroda, Mary Sue & Margaret Mishoe. 1995.  "I jus like to look at me
> some goats":  Dialectal pronominals in Southern English.  Paper
> presented at NWAV 24 conference,
>
> LH
>
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All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
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                                              -Sam'l Clemens

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