Safire: "... You cannot say 'more *woman*'; ..."

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Mar 20 03:04:59 UTC 2007


Actually, he was a *manish* boy, as attested to not only by Muddy's
own pronunciation, but also by the labels on the original 78 and 45
Chess-records. The "corrected" resppelling, "mannish," is quite
recent, dating not much farther back than the past twenty years or
fewer.

-Wilson

On 3/19/07, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC <Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
> Subject:      Re: Safire: "... You cannot say 'more *woman*'; ..."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >In a similar syntactic vein, Bo Diddley specified himself as being
> >"500% _more man_ / [and] can lay more pipe than a plumber can" back in
> >1965.
>
> And of course, Muddy Waters was a "mannish boy".
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


--
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

Dope wil get you through times of no money better than money will get
you through times of no dope.
-----
                                         -Free-Wheeling Franklin

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list