dialectal "from the home" /of the home

[James A. Landau]

Wilson Gray writes:

> BTW, the funeral cortege of any dead Texan,
>  irrespective of race, creed, color, or sexual orientation, is escorted
>  to his/her final resting place by the Texas State Police (not to be
>  confused with the Texas Rangers).

> I'm not even sure that Marshall had any regular peace officers

The town of Marshall had no town marshal?

It is said that the reason the US Army does not have the rank of "Marshal" or
"Field Marshal" is that the first man to be considered for such a rank was
General (i.e. then four stars) George C. Marshall, and he refused to become
"Marshal Marshall".

It is certainly possible that George C. Marshall made such a statement.
However, the first man to be considered for a rank equivalent to Field Marshal was
Pershing, in the first World War.  Pershing, for some reason unknown to me,
instead became "General of the Armies" rather than "Field Marshal."

A Texas Ranger cannot be described as a "peace officer" because the Rangers
are theoretically not a police force but rather the private army of the State
of Texas.

Beverly Flanigan writes:

> I'd add that city or county
> police (or sheriffs) always escort funeral processions "up home" in
> Minnesota, and I presume everywhere else.  A procession might travel 50
> miles or more in a rural area, and police must clear the way and maintain
> reasonable speed.

Wilson Gray writes:

> At my grandfather's
> funeral, the presence of the state-police escort was not considered to
> be worthy of comment. In 1956, the presence of the Texas State Police
> at a large gathering of black people would more likely have caused
> panic, let alone comment, unless it was an ordinary occurrence,
> expected under the circumstances. And an escort by the state police was
> not a service that the state of Texas would have provided to black
 >people and denied to white people.

John Baker writes:

> The people in this rural area continue the custom of stopping on the
highway and
> waiting for the funeral procession to pass.

More than a custom; it is part of good driving practice and may be state law
in most states.  At least it may be state law that once a convoy (any convoy
on the road, not only a funeral procession) passes a traffic light and the
light turns red, the convoy keeps going.  The custom of having the headlights on
in a funeral procession has nothing to do with respect for the deceased.  It is
a warning to other motorists that this is a convoy.  In fact, convoys other
than funeral processions (which generally means military convoys) also have
headlights on.

As for the police escort, that is because a funeral procession, regardless of
race creed or hairstyle, is an equal-opportunity creator of traffic problems.
 It is not a "service provided to white people" but rather a necessity for
the police department, one of whose duties is to clear up trafic problems.

Wilson Gray writes:

> when my father first went up to
> Madison from his home hamlet of Moundville, Alabama, to get what was
> then an LlB [sic] but is now a JD, the locals had problems with his
> Alabama-backwater version of BE. As he put it, "When I first went up
> yonder to go to school, folk in Wisconsin couldn't understand my
> Alabama brogue." The OED has "brogue, n. A strongly-marked dialectal
> pronunciation or accent."  Webster's New World has "the pronunciation
> peculiar to a dialect."

I was under the impression that "brogue" referred specifically to an Irish
accent.