Fixing the Pronunciation of Arkansas--Senator Johnson's Great Speech

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:22 PM -0600 2/11/03, Gerald Cohen wrote:
>>At 1:53 PM -0500 2/11/03, Bethany K. Dumas wrote:
>>Apparently the pronunciation of Arkansas was fixed by legislative
>>fiat. See Proceedings of the Legislature and of the Historical Society of
>>the State of Arkansas, and the Eclectic Society, of Little Rock, Ark.,
>>Fixing the Pronunciation of the Name Arkansas; Little Rock, 1881.
>>
>>Bethany
>
>
>     There's a hilarious ribald speech, never actually given, by a
>supposed Arkansas senator Cassius F. Johnson denouncing the attempt
>to change the pronunciation of Arkansas to make it sound like Kansas.
>According to my notes it's in Vance Randolph's classic _Pissing In
>The Snow and Other Ozark Folktales_, 1976, pp. 171-173, followed by
>comments from the annotator of that edition of that book.
>
Among the comments by Randolph, also reproduced in the web posting
John Baker referred to, is the fact that "the controversy about the
pronunciation of Arkansas is discussed, with rich documentation, by
Allen Walker Read (American Speech VIII, 42-46)".
[Pissing in the Snow, p. 173]