Fwd: 'Texes' as plural of 'text (message)'

[Laurence Horn]

Strange.  We spent some time on this verse many years ago, at which point I revealed the version I learned, which went something like

Hitler had only one left ball.
Goering had two, but they were small.
Himmler
Had something sim'lar.
And Goebbals
Had no balls
At all.

No room for testes here, though.  (I brought up the fact that the version above builds in a weird semantics, in that virtually *all* men have only one left ball, so this must be understood as "only one, i.e./in particular left, ball", and my surmise was that the only reason the "left" was there at all was for the metrics. Others on the list had other versions to recall, and did so.  But I recall no "testes" in any of them, as opposed to testes.  Please elucidate, sir.

LH

 


Begin forwarded message:

> From: Michael Newman <michael.newman at QC.CUNY.EDU>
> Date: February 2, 2012 11:17:51 AM EST
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: 'Texes' as plural of 'text (message)'
> Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> 
> I hear tha occasionally with aae speakers and Latinos. I think I have only one or two cases in my corpus, which includes only one "testes," as in that old song about hitler. (sorry couldn't resist, and if you don't get it google "himmler had something similar")
> 
> Seriously, it's well documented but I don't remember where exactly
> 

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