pail of tears

[Beverly Flanigan]

Yeah, but Dylan was always trying to sound Southern or Appalachian.  As
Trudgill pointed out, his "The times, they are a-changing" is a strange
blend of standard and mountain; he pronounced the a-prefix as [e] and
didn't change the -ng/[N] to [n].  So "them buckets" don't wash with me!

Seriously though, I seem to recall "cried buckets" as the idiom we all grew
up with even in Minnesota--and whether it was as container or droplets
didn't seem to matter.  But my memory is getting older and older. . . .

At 04:02 PM 12/26/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>At 3:44 PM -0500 12/26/03, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
>>No, that's not "vale of tears."  In the NY Times last week, I saw another
>>gem:  Someone wrote an article that mentioned someone crying "a pail of
>>tears."  (Sorry, I always seem to recycle my newspapers before I remember
>>to clip for ADS referencing.)  Now, if the writer is a Northerner, I
>>suppose the phrase makes sense,
>
>Bob Dylan's a Northerner (< Hibbing, Minnesota), and for him it's buckets:
>
>Buckets of rain, buckets of tears,
>Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears
>
>--of course "pails of tears" wouldn't have scanned as well.
>
>>but I'm a Northerner too and I've never
>>ever heard the common idiom phrased in this way.
>
>Which idiom?  Bucket(s) of tears?  I wasn't familiar with that before
>the Dylan song.  And vale of tears (as in describing this world as a
>___) is quite a different kettle o' fish.  Or tears.
>
>>  Has anyone else?  And
>>would this imply that one would also say "she cried a pailfull" or "his
>>tears came down in pails"?
>
>I take "pail" or "bucket" to refer to the container filled by the
>tears, not the manner in which they fall, so no, they wouldn't come
>down in pails or buckets, just lots of drops, enough for
>(metaphorical) pailfuls.  I suppose "she cried a pailful/bucketful"
>would be interpretable.
>
>L