New thread--a curious thing

[Bob Haas]

Thanks for the feedback from everyone.  I'm not so much gladdened by the
results (I'm not alone in my yikes-ness!) as I am happy to have my curiosity
relieved.  I grew up in the the mountains of NC--pretty heavily English and
Scottish influence--but I'd not be surprised to learn that I might have
picked up yikes from comic books.  I took my first reading steps with Dick,
Jane and Sally, but I learned to fly with Superman and Batman and
Spider-man.  No discrimination between DC or Marvel.

BTW, yipes sounds very strange to me.  It has the resonance of yikes, but
sounds like one must clean up after it, as in: "He had a bad case of the
yipes."

Yikes!

> From: Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Reply-To: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2000 10:18:40 -0700
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Re: New thread--a curious thing
>
> so the dictionaries - at least, the ones i have within a few feet
> of my computer - line up as american P vs. british K (insofar as
> they have entries at all).  this is odd, since haas and zwicky,
> both americans, are definitely in the K camp.
>
> is there actually a general british/american divide here (with a
> few exceptional speakers, like bob and me), or is this some artefact
> of dictionary construction?