Charleston, SC, dialect

[Wilson Gray]

Okracoke?! "I useta woik in that town!" to borrow the catchphrase of
"Shelton" from the old radio show, _It Pays To Be Ignorant_. In
reality, when I was in the Army, I knew a guy from there.
Unfortunately, since he was both an older white Southernor and an NCO,
we didn't become close, though he tried to befriend me. He even lent
me his can of DDT powder, when I had need of it. (It worked like a
charm, BTW. That shit be fire.) So, I missed a chance to get to know
someone who was a native speaker of a rarely-heard dialect.

-Wilson

On 11/8/06, 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: Charleston, SC, dialect
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 10:01 PM -0500 11/8/06, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
> >>Except for their clearly
> >>pronouncing "'night" as "noyt," there was nothing else of interest in
> >>the women's speech. They didn't even sound particularly Southern.
> >
> >I don't know much about this, but there is supposedly such a shift in the
> >Outer Banks: some folks there are called "hoi toiders" ("high tiders")
> >sometimes.
> >
> >That's North Carolina, though, I guess ....
> >
> Yes, specifically Okracoke I., as investigated and described by Walt
> Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes.  The "hoi toider" is a
> shibboleth for the locals there.
>
> LH
>
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>


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Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
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race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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