" Olive, the other reindeer"

[Charles Doyle]

Try this one, dInIs. It's one of those old title-author jokes (it doesn't work at all in my dialect; I can't remember how long it took me to "get it"):

_School Lunches_, by Maj. Sick.

--Charlie
____________________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 11:45:32 -0400
>From: "Dennis R. Preston" <preston at MSU.EDU>
>Subject: Re: " Olive, the other reindeer"
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
>---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       "Dennis R. Preston" <preston at MSU.EDU>
>
>James,
>
>Why are you surprised? Some of us are just very serious persons. (It
>may also be the case that "when my pragmatic organizer took over" the
>lag was very short indeed.)
>
>For some reason, I got the "holly" and "Charlie" rhyme, instantly but
>I attribute that to the "Boston" priming.
>
>I actually don't know of many cross-phonemic (timed) comprehension
>tests, although I have conducted a number of cross-phonemic
>comprehension tests within changing dialectal frameworks and find it
>odd that speakers of changing dialects are not always that much
>better at understanding the new forms than others. For example, when
>young persons from the Detroit area are played samples of words like
>"bet" with increasingly lower or backer positions (forms they would
>use themselves), they very often misunderstand the words to be "bat"
>or "bet," respectively. It's almost as if their producers are out in
>front of their perceivers.
>
>Weird.
>
>dInIs

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