cooking roadkill for tea

Lynne Murphy m.l.murphy at SUSSEX.AC.UK
Mon Oct 30 09:57:08 UTC 2006


I have a little collection going (for a future blog entry) of "quotations"
from print media that I strongly suspect are not direct quotations because
they contain lexical items from the 'wrong' (UK/US) dialect.  (I'd do
grammatical changes too, but haven't got any in my collection.)  For
example, American rock stars are often quoted in the UK press talking about
their "mums", rather than their "moms".  (Some people count that as just a
spelling difference--but I think it's a proper lexical difference.)

I came across this one, "spoken" by a member of the Gossip.  It's a
Portland, OR band, but 2/3 of them (including the quotee) are from rural
Arkansas.  The quotation goes:

"If my dad hit a deer in his car, he'd just say 'sweet!'" grins Brace.
"Then he'd drive home with it on the hood and we'd cook it for tea."  [The
Guide (The Guardian), Oct 28-Nov 3 2006]

Do people from Arkansas use 'tea' as a name for an early evening meal?  I
have the suspicion that he said 'dinner', but that that was deemed by the
writer to sound too formal for the picture of hickdom that he was trying to
paint.  (I've been told here how 'charming' it is that we colonials say we
have dinner every day.)

Of course, they did keep the Americanism "hood".  The punctuation is also
weird (non-standard British), but that's another matter!

Incidentally, if you come across any such oddly-dialected quotations,
you're most welcome to pass them my way.

Best,
Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer and Head of Department
Linguistics and English Language
Arts B135
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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



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