wag

[Dan Goodman]

Wilson Gray wrote:
> On Nov 18, 2004, at 2:30 AM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
>
>> Manly Wade Wellman, _The Lost and the Lurking_ (1981), p. 72:
>> <<"... You just let me wag your stuff back here. ....">>. Speaker
>> is a black man
>
>
> So, in some parts of the country, "wag" *is* used by male speakers. I
>  was wondering about that.

Or was used by male speakers.  According to the International
Speculative Fiction Data Base, Wellman was born in 1903.  His personal
knowledge of such things and/or the reference works he used might well
date from before you were born.

My great-grandmother came to the US right after WW I, speaking three
living languages (and perhaps Hebrew).  She never learned English; she
lived in a NYC neighborhood where everyone spoke Yiddish.  My
great-grandfather had to learn English; he owned a newsstand, and he had
to communicate with customers.

It seems likely to me that English-speaking men might similarly have to
learn a more generally-used dialect of English, while women in the same
group might not.  (I'm not a linguist, but I suspect that there's been
at least one study of this.)

And after a while, certain words in that group's dialect might become
thought of as women's words; and boys growing up with that perception
would avoid using such words.  (And that's something I'm _certain_ has
been studied.)

--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Predictions http://seeingfutures.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.