Dueling dialects

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Aug 11 03:26:04 UTC 2010


The other day, I was helping my wife hang pictures. We started with
the family prize, a supposedly-genuine Erte "B," inherited from her
late mother, Betty. After we'd hung that, she said to me,

"Okay. Now, let's hang the 'Y.' "

As I searched through the stack of paintings, etc., I thought, Hm. I
didn't know that we had two Ertes. I wonder whether that's one's also
genuine. But I couldn't find any "Y." I gave up, called my wife over,
and asked her whether she was certain that we had a "Y." I'd never
seen such a painting before and I couldn't find one such, now. She
came over, saying that I actually *hadn't* seen it before, since it
had been in storage till we moved back to her hometown. But, there it
was, right in front of me. I looked again, seeing only the same
Impressionistic painting that I'd seen before: a frog on a lilypad
with _WHY?_ in large, sans-serif letters painted across its top.

WTF? *I* would have referred to that painting as the "Frog."
--
-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

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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