Prescriptive Linguists

Amy West medievalist at W-STS.COM
Thu Jan 31 15:54:52 UTC 2008


It sounds fine to me as well, Wilson. What exactly is the "problem",
other than perhaps a colloquial/dialectal use of "get"? I need to be
illuminated. I clearly recognize it as informal, but beyond that....

---Amy West

>Date:    Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:30:17 -0200
>From:    "David A. Daniel" <dad at POKERWIZ.COM>
>Subject: Re: Prescriptive Linguists
>
>Hold on there. "Get you a tray" is a whole different ball o' wax. "Get
>yourself a tray" might be somewhat more used, but probably not a lot. "I'm
>gonna get me a beer", "He's gonna get him a woman". Different argument
>altogether.
>DAD
>
>
>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

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