accusative cursing

[Jonathan Lighter]

Around here many folks say / waz /.  One of them must have introduced "wuz" to indicate phonetic deviance.

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: accusative cursing
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At 12:34 AM -0400 4/14/07, James Harbeck wrote:
>Funny thing how spelling can make so much difference in some of these
>things. Pretty much everyone in Canada pronounces "stupid" as
>['stupId] and not ['stjupId], but if you spell it "stoopid" that
>indicates that the person is speaking in a low-grade, uneducated
>manner. Likewise, many high-price Brits pronounce "ate" as [Et], but
>if you spell it that way ("et"), it's emblematic of a country hick.
>And so on. The implication being, evidently, that these people,
>forced to exhaust themselves writing it down, would write it that
>way... ditto with "nekkid," I suppose.

Along the same lines, consider the spelling of _was_ as "wuz" (as in
the fan's complaint about an umpire's decision, "We wuz robbed"!). I
remember reading that explained as the way people who spoke that way
would write it, even though everyone else pronounces it "wuz" too.
"Luv" is analogous but a bit more complicated (when it's not being
used to indicate a non-standard British pronunciation with a rounded
vowel).

LH

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