y'all-omigod-bonics

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Nov 28, 2005, at 12:56 PM, Brenda Lester wrote:

> So not amusing.
>
> "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:  the following
> bit of dialect mockery was posted...

mockery is rarely amusing.

it's nice that as a piece of writing supposed to be characterizing
southerners as ignorant and uneducated oafs, it manages to exhibit
(as several of the regulars have now pointed out) genuine factual
ignorance, by identifying the capital of alabama as birmingham rather
than montgomery.  this is the sort of thing that makes mockery risky,
as people who dump on others for their spelling errors and typos and
so on frequently discover.

arnold