'sup?

[Wilson Gray]

On Oct 19, 2004, at 11:44 AM, Alice Faber wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: 'sup?
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> Dennis R. Preston said:
>> The reduction of 'What's up' regularly occurs as /tsup/ (adding
>> another item to the 'tsetse fly' list of onset /ts/ forms in
>> English). The next stage of reduction compensatorily lengthens /s/
>> (/ssup/), but the last stage, as one would suspect from the
>> phonotactics of English, does away with this lengthening and yields
>> simply /sup/.
>
> I'd always assumed that 'sup, definitely with a lengthened /ss/, was
> a clipping of "whassup", with the /t/ already having assimilated to
> the following /s/.
> --
> =======================================================================
> =======
> Alice Faber
> faber at haskins.yale.edu
> Haskins Laboratories                                  tel: (203)
> 865-6163 x258
> New Haven, CT 06511 USA                                     fax (203)
> 865-8963
>

I'm with you, Alice. I've been using "Ssup?" as the salutation in
letters and as the subject of e-mails to my brother for about the past
thirty years or more. At first, I used it only as a joke, since
[(hw^t])s haepnIn] remained the preferred hip soul greeting well into
the '70's. IMO, though, trying to pin down this expression to a
particular date or a particular place would be as fruitless as trying
to pin down "howdy" to a particular date.

-Wilson  Gray