"Give me some sugar."

[Dennis Preston]

'Give me some sugar' was very common among white folk in Southern
Illinois, Southern Indiana, Northern Kentucky, including use by my
grandparents, making it  much older, in the early 40s and 50s. It is
it old timey indeed; could be gone.

dInIs

>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>-----------------------
>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>Subject:      "Give me some sugar."
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>When I was at UC Davis in 1969, I had occasion to say to my
>girlfriend, a white native of Sacramento, "Gimme some sugar'." After
>an awkward silence lasting some few seconds, she finally replied, "I
>don't know what you mean." From that time to the present, I've asked a
>random assortment of white Northerners about this expression and have
>yet to find one who was familiar with it. (I haven't asked any white
>Southerners, since they're as rare as black people in the rarefied
>Northern atmosphere in which I live. In addition, I've, for no good
>reason, assumed that the expression is General Southern and is not
>peculiar to BE.)
>
>Google yields about 80,000 raw hits for all variants: "sugar" v.
>"suga," "give me" v. "gimme," etc.
>
>DARE has only(?) "gimme some juice," under GIVE, presumably only in
>its literal meaning. Interestingly enough, all of DARE's Black
>variants are in use nearly everywhere in BE as I know it.
>
>So, I guess that this is still almost surely only a Down-Home expression.
>
>-Wilson
>
>-Wilson
>
>--
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-----
>                                               -Sam'l Clemens
>
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>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org


--
Dennis R. Preston
University Distinguished Professor
Department of English
Morrill Hall 15-C
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48864 USA

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