childhood rhymes

[Mark A. Mandel]

Jonathan Lighter writes:

        >>>
Just for the sake of accuracy: We always "pronounced the g."

Also, the "aw" in "Spaulding" is not the /a/" in "spalpeen."
        <<<

(1) We never did.

(2) That's right by me: /O/ (open-o, low back rounded vowel, as in "soft",
distinct in our dialect from unrounded /a/.


"Douglas G. Wilson" notes:

        >>>
But Jerome Foster and Mark Mandel (if I understood him right) remember
"spaldeen" without the "-ng".

Another peculiarity: RHUD gives the pronunciation of "spaldeen" with
last-syllable stress! Does this match the recollections of the list folks?
        <<<

(1) Yes, you understood me right, if I understand you right. :-)

(2) It matches mine, as well as Jesse's.

[By the way, the reason, or one reason, why I'm always throwing my two cents
in a day late is that I subscribe to the list in digest form.]

And, in a felicitous bit of fortuitous timing, from today's New York Times.
I have left the text intact down through the relevant point to maintain the
context:

        >>>

August 2, 2004
The Neighborhood Ties That Still Bind
By COREY KILGANNON

Families and high schools are not the only institutions that have reunions.
Some New York City housing projects have them too, welcoming back former
residents who have moved on up or simply away.

One project, the Amsterdam Houses on the West Side of Manhattan, held a
reunion this weekend that brought together war babies who had grown up side
by side and formed an unusually tight-knit group. For three days, hundreds
of former residents from all over the city and the country gathered to meet
on the blacktop of a playground near the complex, just west of Lincoln
Center.

The Amsterdam Houses first opened in 1947 for veterans returning from World
War II. The project was unique at the time for its diversity, especially in
a city still divided into pockets of ethnic neighborhoods. The G.I.'s and
their wives begat a generation of war babies, born within the next few
years, who came of age in the late 1950's and the 1960's on a different kind
of battlefield - the streets - where they faced drugs, gangs and the Vietnam
War draft.

"The group you see here are the survivors, but a lot didn't survive," said
one of those war babies, Earl Spencer Dow, now 57. "Everyone was poor, but
there were no racial barriers. We all just got along."

The old gang began arriving Friday at the playground of Public School 191,
at Amsterdam Avenue and 60th Street, which was once softball central. They
found its backstop partly dismantled, and some of the playground had been
turned into a parking lot for school employees.

But the former neighbors hugged and greeted one another by their old
nicknames. Irish men danced merengue, Latinos sang along with the Stylistics
and black women swayed to Sinatra. As night fell, some gathered to sing old
doo-wop numbers.

And, of course, to remember what it was like to grow up in postwar New York,
with dozens of children your age just a door or a floor away.

Patrick Mann, 61, who now lives in Fort Worth, recalled the days when he and
other boys traveled all over the city in ragtag uniforms, shellacking
basketball teams from other neighborhoods. When the good times cost nothing,
because a refund from Walker's variety store for a load of soda bottles
could buy a Spaldeen, the pink rubber ball used in stickball. When you could
make a pair of cardboard knee pads for a roller hockey game (if the skates
were not already in use on a milk crate scooter).

[...]

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
        <<<



-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]