Dawgs

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:36 PM -0400 10/26/06, Alice Faber wrote:
>I'm quite sure that Labov treats SAUCE/SOURCE in NYC as a near merger.
>
>Somewhere in my files, I have an old New Yorker article by a NYC cop
>with literary aspirations. One anecdote in this article about street
>policing deals with the apparent ambiguity of PORN SHOP/PAWN SHOP.
>
f
Here it is from mine (merged from two handouts from my Dialects class):

(1) from Marcus Laffey, "Cop Diary:  The Word on 
the Street", New Yorker, 8/10/98:

I recently overheard a two-minute conversation 
between cops which looped around one word:
"He robbed a pawn store."
"A porn store?"
"Yeah, a pawn store."
"Right, porn."
"Pawn."
"PornŠo?"

(2) Rhotic embarrassment revisited (via Yale Daily News, 11/14/00, p. 2):

CORRECTION
An article and a headline about an abandoned 
building on Chapel Street incorrectly stated that 
the building housed a porn shop. It was the 
former site of a pawn shop, not a porn shop.

LH

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