"Andrea"

[Wilson Gray]

On 1/4/06, Jim Parish <jparish at siue.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jim Parish <jparish at SIUE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Andrea"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Wilson Gray wrote:
> > For a very long time, it seems to me, a distinction was made between
> Englis=
> > h
> > "ANdrea," a feminine name, and Italian "anDREa," a masculine name
> equivalen=
> > t
> > to English "Andrew." Recently, I've noticed that there are a lot of
> women
> > and girls being addressed as "anDREa." Now, I've just heard an
> > Italian-American guy named Salvatore Piazza refer to his wife as
> "anDREa."
> > If the distinction no longer matters even among Italian-Americans, what
> can
> > you do? Another one bites the dust. Sigh.
>
> Back in the early '80s I knew a young woman who went to great lengths to
> convince people to pronounce her name "anDREa". As she was both attractive
> and
> physically formidable, most people acceded fairly quickly.
>
> Jim Parish
> -------------------------------------------------
> SIUE Web Mail



She's a prime example of why it is that we don't want those people speaking
our language! ;-)

But, seriously, folks, from my childhood, I remember a girl whose sick
parents had not only given her the name, "Ccil," but also had the gall to
demand that it be pronounced "Cecil"!

-Wilson