spaldeens!

[Geoffrey S. Nathan]

At 06:40 PM 8/1/2004, you wrote:
>Haven't heard that word for more than sixty years!  It was a corruption of
>Spaulding, I suppose. A mfr. of sports equipment.

Yes, indeed, my wife the Brooklynite insists the word is correctly
pronounced /,spal'din/ with a secondary stress on the first syllable and a
primary on the second syllable.  While it may well derive from 'Spalding',
the word acquired a tense, stressed final vowel and an alveolar final
consonant (the acoustic similarities between [IN] and [in] probably explain
this).  Margaret says 'you got a new one every spring, and you got to write
your name on it.'  It was definitely pink, and was used to play stoopball,
stickball, punchball, 'hit the penny' (not mentioned so far) and all the
'under-the-leg' games, such as 'one-two-three O'Leary' and 'A my name is
Alice'.

Just a few words from my native speaker consultant.

Geoff
Geoffrey S. Nathan
Department of English/Computing and Information Technology
Wayne State University
Detroit, MI, 48202
<geoffnathan at wayne.edu>
Phones:  C&IT (313) 577-1259/English (313) 577-8621