"Shev-uh-lay"

[Margaret Lee]

When I was growing up in southwestern Virginia, African Americans jokingly used 'Chevrolet' to mean *shove*one foot and *lay* the other, that is, to walk, many times the only option to get from point A to point B when there was no transportation available.  You simply 'drive your Chevrolet.'
Any memory of this in your experience,  Wilson?

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
>In Jim Croce's "Rapid Roy", there is a line which refers to "a dirt-track
>demon in a '57 Chevrolet". Croce quite clearly pronounces the last word
>without an 'r': "shev-uh-lay". (I'm not up on asciified IPA; sorry.) I don't
>recall hearing that pronunciation anywhere else. Has anyone on-list? If
>so, where (geographically or socially) does it occur, and are there other
>examples of dropped syllable-initial 'r'?
>
>Jim Parish

But is the /r/ really syllable-initial? I think it's not so much the
dropping of a syllable-initial /r/ but the simplification (natural
enough, especially in fast/colloquial style) of a /vr/ cluster, which
facilitates resyllabification as [SE.v at .'le] (Or maybe the /v/ ends
up phonetically as ambisyllabic? My phonetician colleagues are out
of town.) I can imagine "everybody" undergoing the same
simplification, resulting in "ev'ybody" or "ev'abody", despite the
fact that we might regard the underlying form as involving a
syllable-initial /r/ there as well. And how about "average" as
['aev at j]?

Larry

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