Coming together ...

[Wilson Gray]

While moving apart.

On the Judge Mathis Show, I've just heard a black speaker say:

"I _never_ touched him, your honor. I _never_ put a hand on him."

I would have expected to hear:

"I _didn't_ / _ain't_ touch him, your honor. I _didn't_ / _ain't_ put
a hand on him."

When we moved up to Saint Louis from Texas, this (still) peculiar (to
me) construction of _never_ was one of the first structural
differences between BE and WE that I noticed. The other thing was the
use of "youse" for "you."

OTOH, if anyone wanted to claim that the -'s possessive, the -'s
reduction of _is_, and the third-person singular -s are no longer
extant in BE, I would not gainsay him:

"She say that she going over to her baby daddy mama house."

-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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