The prejudice store

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Apr 20, 2008, at 5:29 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> I'm the next thing to absolutely certain that my friend meant "a store
> whose staff is prejudiced" and not "a store where prejudice is one of
> the products available for purchase."

that was my understanding as well.

>
> In my childhood and youth, BE-speakers clearly said, e.g. "-assed" in
> locutions like _big-assed  black-assed dumb-assed  shit(ty)-assed_,
> etc. Nowadays, I hear and see written big-ass, etc. However, if I were
> doing the writing, I would write _big-ass'  black-ass'_, etc., since I
> still "hear" the deleted -ed. But that's just me. (Do white speakers
> use that locution?)
>
> _Prejudice'  bias'_ are pretty much the "standard" BE pronunciations
> of _prejudiced  biased_, words that are more likely to be heard than
> read. IMO, the examples below are illustrations of the consequences of
> the same phenomenon of heard but not read among other speakers. But,
> again, that's just me.

there are several different things going on here.  there are people
like you who lack the final t/d variably or generally in the
pronunciation of certain words but who seem to have the segments
mentally; they'll be inclined to spell the -ed or to use an apostrophe
to indicate its absence in pronunciation.  there are others who seem
to have lexicalized the t/d-less versions of certain words; they won't
give any indication of these segments in their spellings.  i took the
spellings "prejudice" and "bias" to be symptoms of this sort of
lexicalization.

to make things more complicated still, different people have different
systems.

as for X-ass and X-assed, things are really complicated.  "smart-ass"
and "bad-ass" have clearly developed noun uses for many people,
probably through the potential of things like "smart-ass kid" for
interpretation either as adjective + noun or noun + noun.  eventually
we get "he's a real smart-ass/bad-ass".  probably different words have
different statuses for different people.

arnold

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