[Ads-l] fewofa

[Jonathan Lighter]

I still hear the schwa, but its presence may be an artifact of moving from
/ v / to /w /.

Not that the grammar is much better without it.

JL

On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 2:53 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: fewofa
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Sorry, I missed that JL had already posted the CNN transcript.
>
>
> On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 2:46 PM, Ben Zimmer <bgzimmer at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 10:46 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> >>
> >> Historian Douglas Brinkley on CNN:
> >>
> >> "It's amazing how much Lincoln could say in so few of a words."
> >>
> >> Let's see if this is corrected in the transcript.
> >
> > CNN's utterly unreliable transcript reads:
> >
> > http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1501/02/cnr.03.html
> > "...he [Mario Cuomo] worked on books on Abraham Lincoln and was amazed
> > that Lincoln could say so much in the Gettysburg address or
> > emancipation proclamation and so few words."
> >
> > I found the clip in the TV News Archive on archive.org (a terrific
> resource):
> >
> >
> https://archive.org/details/CNNW_20150102_150000_CNN_Newsroom_With_Carol_Costello#start/1180/end/1200
> >
> > Here's how I would transcribe it:
> >
> > "He worked on books on Abraham Lincoln and was always very amazed that
> > Lincoln could say so much, in the Gettysburg Address or Emancipation
> > Proclamation, in so few of words."
> >
> > Definitely hearing it as "so few of words," not "so few of a words."
>
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-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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