"They Also Serve Who Only Vote on 'Ain't'" in NYT

[Margaret Lee]

I agree with Wilson. My mother (who died in 2001 at the age of 91) and her sister (two years older) used "holler at" regularly to mean to speak to someone, to greet someone.

  Margaret

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
  I wonder whether anyone is dealing with "holler at" in its "current"
slang usage. I put "current" in quotes because the supposedly "new"
usage, as in, "Let me holler at you for a minute," "I just stopped by
to holler at you," "The next time that you come by here, why don't you
holler at me?" "All that you really had to do was to holler at me,"
etc., wherein "holler" clearly is not being used as a synonym of
"shout," etc., was used by my late grandparents and is still used in
these and similarly seemingly slangish ways by members of my
94-year-old mother's cohort. That is, WRT BE, this way of using
"holler at" has been "standard" for over a century, at least.

-Wilson


 __________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org