"Is you is or is you ain't?" (1921)

[Wilson Gray]

And what is it that's supposed to be "humorous" in this fiction? Its
content or the fact that it's written in "black dialect"? Did Mr.
Cohen live long enough to become familiar with the "Carolina
Israelite"?

-Wilson Gray

On 6/11/05, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at rci.rutgers.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at RCI.RUTGERS.EDU>
> Subject:      "Is you is or is you ain't?" (1921)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Like many of my generation, I was first introduced to Louis Jordan's 1944
> hit "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?" via the Tom & Jerry cartoon
> "Solid Serenade" (1946). (Jordan cowrote the song, his first million
> seller, with Bill Austin.) I came across a much earlier example of "Is you
> is or is you ain't" in a 1921 story by Octavus Roy Cohen, a Jewish writer
> from South Carolina who wrote humorous black-dialect fiction:
>
> -----
> "Less Miserable" by Octavus Roy Cohen
> _Chicago Tribune_, Sep. 25, 1921, (Magazine) p. 1/3
> "What I asks you straight an' plain: Is you gwine loant me them two
> dollars, or ain't you?"
> "I ain't said I ain't."
> "You ain't said you is."
> "I ain't said nothin'."
> "Well, I asks: Is you is or is you ain't?"
> -----
>
> Cohen wrote a similar exchange in a story the following year:
>
> -----
> "Fifty-Fifty Fifty" by Octavus Roy Cohen
> _Chicago Tribune_, Nov. 26, 1922, (Magazine) p. 10/1
> "But, Maudlin-- ain't we engage'?"
> "I ain't said we ain't."
> "But you ain't sayin' we is."
> "I ain't sayin' nothin'."
> "Well," desperately. "Is we is, or is we ain't?"
> -----
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>


--
-Wilson Gray