"last stitch effort"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 24, 2004, at 12:34 PM, Wilson Gray asks:

> Does this count as an eggcorn? In the song, Angel Child, Sam
> "Lightnin'" Hopkins , a Texas blues man, sings:
>
> Hwussuh mattuh wit poppo sweet li'l angem chile?
> [,,,] matter with papa's sweet little angel child?
>
> Then, doing the standard blues singer's repetition of lines, he sings
> quite clearly:
>
> What's to mattuh wit poppo sweet li'l angem chile?
> *What's to matter* with papa's sweet little angel child?
>
> Changing word-final schwa to /o/ and pronouncing "angel" as "angem"
> are pretty much standard, so to speak, in Southern BE. Loss of
> possessive /s/ is universal, if the ubiquitous "baby mama" and "baby
> daddy" are any indication. Non-deletable word-final /s/ tends to be
> pronounced as a kind of /h/, as in [feix] for "face." When my
> grandparents were still alive, I called them "Mommo" and "Daddo."...
> As a child, I also used "angem" and "what's to matter?"

these are certainly reshapings, but i can't see that they're motivated
by an attempt to get expressions to make more sense.  most likely,
they're phonologically motivated.  "Poppo", "Mommo", and "Daddo" i
*think* i understand; they are likely to be emphatic pronunciations, in
which final schwa is "restored" to its "full" version /o/ (undoing the
reduction to schwa seen in words like "yellow" and "window").

the /m/ of "angem" is a bit trickier.  here's one possibility: suppose
that the /l/ of "angel" is vocalized (this is common enough, in BE and
elsewhere).  then the word ends in a rounded vowel.  if the word's at
the end of a sentence (in, say, "you're an angel"), then you close your
lips.  and you're in the /m/ position.  so other people -- children, in
particular, whose vocabulary knowledge is less than yours -- might
understand you to have been trying to produce an /m/.  so they
reproduce the word with an /m/, on your model.

yeah, i know, it's a complicated story, full of supposition.

arnold