The prejudice store
Wilson Gray
hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Apr 21 16:23:37 UTC 2008
I agree. Oddly enough, among blacks of my generation, "smart-ass(ed)
is more likely to mean "intelligent" rather than "smart-alecky" and
"bad-ass(ed)" is pretty much fixed as an adjective. We'd agree with
Cheech & Chong that "Acapulco Gold is bad-ass(ed) weed," but we'd say,
"[Name] is a bad motherfucker" and not a "bad ass." In Saint Louis, we
used a phrase that was basically word-salad, syntactically: ["Name] is
a most motherfucker," but it had the meaning that [Name] was clearly
an impressive person, WRT whatever the context was.
-Wilson
On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 10:48 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky
<zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject: Re: The prejudice store
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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