The Colbert Report: "soda water" (UNCLASSIFIED)

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri May 15 18:32:31 UTC 2009


I'm afraid so. I've never eaten either of these "foods" and I was in
my mid-twenties before I even *heard* of Moon Pies. Apparently, the
latter are so well-known 'neath the Spanish moss hangin' from the
live-oak trees that an interlocutor of mine, a black North Carolinian,
does not believe, to this day - about fifty years later - that I don't
know what a Moon Pie is.

He attributes this - if true (I mus' be jivin', IHO), and it is - to
the fact that I'm a black *Texan.* From his P.O.V., colored folk who
are unacquainted with any aspect whatsoever of (stereo)typical
features of black culture must be from Texas, corrupted by all that
cowboy-longhorn mess. Well, that may be true of black *West* Texans,
but I'm from *East* Texas, the home of ragtime (nobody knows for
certain where Scott Joplin was born, but Marshall and Texarkana are
the prime candidates, according to an article on black music in The
New Yorker published during the 'Seventies; I'll have to see what's in
W'pedia for more recent research) and the Texas blues, and I *still*
don't know what a Moon Pie is.

I have no idea how that came about. Thangs jes' be's that way.

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain





On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  "Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: The Colbert Report: "soda water" (UNCLASSIFIED)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
>>
>> Sidebar: Annoyingly, the only way to find RC in the Orlando market
>> seems
>> to be 2-liter bottles. I can't drink that much before it goes
> flat--but
>> what else am i suppose to eat my Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies
> with?
>>
>
> Everyone knows you drink RC (arr-oh-see co-cola) with Moon Pies, not
> Little Debbies. Â Do you want people to think you are a Philistine?
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
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