Heard on The Judges, etc.

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

Thanks for sharing your intuitions on 'steady.'

FWIW, I would use "tapped out" rather than "spent out."
________________________________________
From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Wilson Gray [hwgray at GMAIL.COM]
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2011 9:55 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: Heard on The Judges, etc.

...

"*They steady having money" [i]s ungrammatical

I agree. IME, a more-usual grammatical version is

"They *keep(s)* money."

FWIW, I prefer

"They steady be having money."

Further IMO,

_Keep(s) money_ is Rockefeller-like in its majesty - these "they" are
wealthy - whereas _steady be having_ implies that there may be times
when those "they" *don't* have money, but only because they are, for
the moment, "spent out" - is that standard? - and those times are so
few and far between that, in the real world, they steady be in the
position to help a brother out. In either case, the source of income
is uninterruptible.

"They be steady having money"

is, for me, saying that "they" have a successful hustle, get a welfare
check, have a civil-service job, or have some other only
reasonably-predictable source of income. But you never know. "They
"attempt to hustle a plain-clothes cop, the welfare check gets stolen,
the civil servant gets laid off.

--
-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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