[Ads-l] New feminine name

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Oct 11 23:14:11 UTC 2016


On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 3:51 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> We've seen female "Johnnies" before, but "John" is (for now) a novelty.


Well, as a matter of fact, one of my childhood friends had a sister called
"John." Of course, her name was spelled _Jeanne_, the family being
"geechies" originally from New Orleans. As far as I can tell, the kind of
speaker that Richard Pryor referred to as "the *real* soul-brother" is
*still* unaware of the existence of simple /ʒ/ as opposed to /dʒ/.
"Measure" rhyming with "ledger" sounds way out even to me.

OTOH, there are a lot of white people on both coasts who regard _Jeanne_ as
the cool way to spell "Jeanie."

And there's the Boston pronunciation of _Therese_ - "Tuh-raze" in my
dialect - as "Treece"

-- 
-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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