"exact(ual)ly"

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Sun, 23 Jan 2005 13:15:14 -0600,   "Cohen, Gerald Leonard"
<gcohen at UMR.EDU> writes:

>           In a similar vein (if I remember right), The Zippidy doo-dah song
> contains the line "Everything is satisfactual." Here too we see partial
> phonetic overlap ("ac" in "fac(t)" and "actual." So "actual" was grafted
onto
> "satisfac-", perhaps merely as poetic licence, with the loss of the -"tory"
("
> satisfactory").
>          Again, this is valid only if my memory is correct.

Yes, your memory is correct.  If my memory is correct, the song is sung by
Uncle Remus inthe Walt Disney movie "Song of the South", which is based (more or
less) on the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris.

"Satisfactual" is poetic licence, nothing more.  It was invented to have a
rhyme with "actual" which ended the previous line of the song.  My guess is that
the writer of the song realized he had to do something to make Uncle Remus
sound like a black slave, or more exactly to sound like Harris's rendition of
supposed ante-bellum AAVE.   The rest of the song having no features not in
educated white English, the writer apparently stuck in "satisfactual" to keep
Uncle Remus from sounding like his white owner.

Now to go way off topic:

I saw "Song of the South" only once, and I was in elementary school at the
time and don't recall much of the movie.  In these Politically Correct days, how
is "Song of the South" considered?  PC?  Politically Incorrect?  or what?

Also, I am curious as to today's PC rating of Vachel Lindsay's poem "The
Congo".

 - James A. Landau