positive anymore

[Wilson Gray]

That's why you have to avoid getting accustomed to this kind of
stuff. ;-) The first time that I heard the plural, "baby daddies," ca.1993,
I pictured one of those stereotypical
hospital nurseries filled with male newborns who were themselves the
fathers of a similar nurseryful
of male newborns who were themselves the fathers of a similar nurseryful of
male newborns, ad infinitum. I cracked myself up. These days, naturally,
"baby daddies" / "baby mamas" is no more comical to
me than the current pronunciation of "Submariner" as "Submarine-er,"
though, when I was an avid funnybook reader in the '40's, even we
black children used [s^b-MArIn@(r)]. The singular forms, baby daddy
and baby mama, have been in use since Mother was a
girl, to reprise an expression that was already antiquated when Mother
was a girl.

-Wilson


On 5/18/06, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: positive anymore
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 1:33 PM -0400 5/18/06, Beverly Flanigan wrote:
> >I just talked about this in my Soclx class yesterday and got the most
> >puzzled looks from all but the Midland Ohioans in the class
> >(predictably).  "Needs washed/fixed/done" was also new to most but not
> >puzzling; i.e., outsiders could figure it out.  Positive "anymore"
> >presented a meaning problem which took some time to disambiguate.
>
> This is something Labov has commented on (in print).  Many speakers
> who have almost certainly come into contact with positive "anymore"
> refuse to believe that it has the meaning it does, despite the fact
> that it essentially (though not exactly) means what negative polarity
> "anymore" does, simply lacking the distributional constraint imposed
> on the latter in the standard dialect, which in turn explains why
> only the positive version can be fronted.  It's also not all that
> different from standard Eng. "nowadays", or would be if the latter
> could also be applied to shorter intervals, as "nowanhours" and such.
> (My locus classicus is "The first few rounds were awful, but I've
> been getting really great cards {%anymore/#nowadays}.")
>
> I've seen that brief Kemp Malone note and one or two other mentions
> in American Speech volumes from the 1920's or 1930's.
>
> Larry
>
> >  Shades
> >of Trudgill's polylectalism vs. panlectalism argument with C-J Bailey.
> >
> >At 12:44 PM 5/18/2006, you wrote:
> >>Speaking of positive "anymore" (as we were a few weeks ago), did anyone
> note
> >>the brief note in American Speech in 1931 (6.5, p460) by Kemp Malone?
> Malone
> >>says that he had never heard of it, but a reader reported it from West
> >>Virginia
> >>and says it is heard not merely from "shopgirls" but from "teachers."
> >>
> >>You can access the article through JSTOR and download it as a pdf file.
> >>
> >>I don't think that ADS-L will let me send it as an attached file.
> >>
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