Can some native USA English speakers say "awe" or not

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Fri Oct 27 21:48:23 UTC 2006


And because "night" also suggests "knight," there are even more puns than Shakespeare himself could have been aware of. And "day's" sounds like "daze," and "the day's" could also be "misheard" (that means "trenchantly interpreted by a PhD")
as "today's."

  I  believe too that there's a secret anagram implicating Christopher Marlowe and Lord Bacon in a certain activity, but I'll leave that to the scholars to tease out.

  JL

  I
Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Charles Doyle
Subject: Re: Can some native USA English speakers say "awe" or not
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Glossing Flastaff's ". . . let not us that are squires of the night's body be call'd thieves of the day's beauty" (1 Henry IV, 2. 24-25), Shakespeare scholars have posited a four-way play on the words "body," "bawdy," "beauty," and "booty" (in the old sense!). Of course, wordplay doesn't necessarily entail perfect homophony.

--Charlie
________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 07:26:40 -0700
>From: Jonathan Lighter
>Subject: Re: Can some native USA English speakers say "awe" or not
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>
>If Shakespeare's body language was much like his literary language, he must really have stood out in a crowd.
>
> Same goes for his bawdy language.
> JL
>
>Benjamin Barrett wrote:

>
>Sometimes I have similar thoughts, though opposite.
>
>One day I was in a room of sociolinguistics student and a SL professor and made a reference to the "bawdy" language of Shakespeare. Every single person thought I meant "body" despite the fact that "body language" and 'bawdy language" have different stress patterns. And they were in MY native dialect territory of Seattle; transplants, every one.
>

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



---------------------------------
 Check out the New Yahoo! Mail - Fire up a more powerful email and get things done faster.

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list