"last stitch effort"

[Wilson Gray]

On Sep 24, 2004, at 4:49 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "last stitch effort"
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> 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").

This sounds pretty good. In the song, main stress does fall on the
second syllable of "poppo" and not on the first. It's probably also the
case that very young children are more likely to *call* their
caretakers than they are simply to address them. And, if the call
"ma-MO" gets a more satisfactory response than the call "MA-m@" ... My
intuition is that "DAD-do" is a calque on "MOM-mo."

> 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
>

Right. But what can you do?

-Wilson