Possible antedating of uptalk

David A. Daniel dad at POKERWIZ.COM
Fri Apr 20 14:21:16 UTC 2012


Hmmm. From Alley Oop lyrics: "Cuz he's a mean motah scootah and a bad
go-gettah." Motah scootah must be a euphemism, yes? But the first five pages
of Google hits only refer to the song (except one tweet as
#codenameforbadpeople which didn't lead anywhere) so it apparently is not
something that people in general ran/run around calling each other
euphemistically. Anyone?
DAD

>Geoffrey Steven Nathan wrote

>While listening to SiriusXM radio's 50's channel this morning they played
the novelty song 'Alley Oop' (the older >members will undoubtedly recall the
exceedingly silly song).
>In any case, much of it is 'talked' rather than sung, and I noticed that a
number of the lines appeared (mind you I'm >listening in my car, not
recording and measuring with PRAAT) to be declaratives with at least
suspensive, and perhaps >rising contours. I have neither the time nor the
patience to actually measure these, but it's publicly available data
>(lyrics here:
http://www.digitaldreamdoor.com/pages/lyrics2/nov_alleyoop.html )
>so I throw this out as a hypothesis that someone who'd like to could run
with.

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