-SS -> -ST?

[Wilson Gray]

Well, that is certainly the way that my Texan grandmother pronounced
it: "fice." The way that she used it was to mean, descriptively of a
person, "small, but tough and quick to anger," i.e. something like a
"banty rooster" in disposition. It was many years before I discovered
that "fice" had anything to do with any kind of dog. Before that
discovery, I considered a fice to be something like an elf or a
brownie, just some kind of small, but ass-kicking, mythical being. The
use of this term in my family died with my grandparents.
BTW, is / was there really a breed of dog known as a "fiest" / "feist"
in existence?

-Wilson

On 12/1/06, RonButters at aol.com <RonButters at aol.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       RonButters at AOL.COM
> Subject:      =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20=A0=20=A0=20=A0=20Re:=20[ADS-L]=20-SS=20->=2
>               0?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?-ST=3F?=
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> In a message dated 12/1/06 8:52:21 AM, preston at MSU.EDU writes:
>
>
> > Fiesty (the normal spelling by the way pretty much all over the
> > South) dogs (and people for that matter) may have their label derived
> > from flatulence, but the current sense anywhere I know it carries not
> > one iota of the semantics of this precursor.
> >
>
> In the South, the term for the farty little dog itself is "fice"--no "t"
>
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Sam Clemens

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