New thread--a curious thing

[Arnold Zwicky]

i've been surveying judgments on exclamatory YIKE(S)/YIPE(S)
from participants in a non-language-related newsgroup. i asked
which of these four possibilities (or none) they could use, and
offered the possibility of multiple answers.  i also asked their
age (by decade) and where they mostly lived from ages 2 through
12 (with a fairly coarse grid of locations).  here's a preliminary
report.

so far i have 66 responses, 58 from the u.s.  (i was hoping for
more non-u.s. responses, but so it goes.)

the non-u.s. responses are pretty straightforward:
  canada: 2 YIKES, 1 none
  australia: 1 none
  u.k./republic of ireland: 2 YIKES, 2 none

eyeballing gives no obvious age/region distribution in the u.s.
the main trend pretty much overwhelms everything else.

of the 58 u.s. responses, 49 are for YIKES, alone or in combination
with other possibilities.  the other 9 u.s. responses are mostly
for none:
  none: 5
  YIPES: 2
  YIPES or maybe YIPE: 1
  YIKE: 1

of the 49 u.s. YIKES responses, a stunning 37 were for YIKES *only*.
many of these were annotated with notes strongly supporting this
alternative (one respondent claimed to have uttered the exclamation
only minutes before he got my query); some were more lukewarm, along
the lines of "YIKES is the only one i could possibly say".  a further
2 respondents picked none, but added that if they had to choose it
would be YIKES, only.  in summary:
  YIKES only: 37
  none, but YIKES if necessary: 2
  YIKES preferably, but YIKE is possible: 2
  YIKES preferably, but YIPES is possible: 3
  YIKES preferably, but YIPE is possible: 2
  YIKES or YIPES, no preference given: 2
  YIKES or YIPE, no preference given: 1

the full responses are, as always, full of interesting comments.
one respondent with both K and P as possibilities found a meaning
difference between them.  a number of respondents (in all age
ranges, from their 20s through their 70s) said they'd used YIKES
from childhood (though they might well be mistaken).

quite a few respondents thought they'd learned YIKES from comics or
cartoons; only one of these cited the tv cartoon series Scooby Doo,
and that should be investigated (i don't know what exclamations are
actually used there), but the idea that this series is the source of
the exclamation for most of the respondents is dubious: the
respondents in their 40s-70s didn't watch the show as children; almost
all of my respondents are themselves childless; and diffusion of
variants up from young children to older generations, though not
impossible, is surely rare.

a number of respondents offered other exclamations: YOICK(E)S, YOW,
EEK, JINGS, etc.

so...the S-less variants seem to be rare everywhere, and the P
variants limited to the u.s., but also rare.  british dictionaries
might reasonably treat the P variants as specifically american, but
american dictionaries should by no means prefer them to the K
variants; YIKES seems now to be the very heavy favorite in the u.s.
(adding in the comments on ADS-L would just make the predominance of
YIKES even heavier.)

presumably there is some little bit of cultural history here, one hard
to unearth, given the slowness with which colloquial variants find
their way into the texts that are mined for dictionary citations.
then there's the fact that the K/P relationship is not phonetically
arbitrary; a possible historical source in YOICKS, which the oxford
dictionary folks suggest is related to YOI and HOICK(S) (all of these
being cries to hounds, though they might well have had less elevated
rural antecedents); the role of -S as an extension indicating
affection, or simply making a monosyllabic exclamation easier to
hear; the possibility that these are childhood words that have made
it into the big time; and much else.

in any case, given the apparently uniform K character of british
variants, u.s. P seems to be an innovation, and presumably existed
alongside K - but, by some accident (having perhaps to do with the
users of one variant or the other and the contexts in which they used
the variants) appeared in the texts that got sampled first for
dictionaries.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)