"saditty" (snobbish) from "Saturday"?

[Wilson Gray]

Well, okay. I still have a problem with the phonological development.
OTOH, there's a very real possibility that there is no phonological
development, sensu stricto. Making up a word that's merely based on
the _possible_ pronunciation of another word, according to its
spelling, is hardly unknown amongst the colored. It's not at all
impossible that someone, as a joke, decided to use the pronunciation,
[s@ deTI] or some such, for "sedate" and it took off from there.

You never know.

-Wilson

On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 4:07 PM, Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "saditty" (snobbish) from "Saturday"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Jul 31, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I can't imagine the least connection between Saturday and
>> snobbishness.
>
> Let's not forget that Bonnie Taylor-Blake found a citation for
> "seditty" from 1948 relating the word to "sedate":
>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0806c&L=ads-l&P=617
>
> Whether this is any more plausible than the "Saturday" derivation, I cannot say.
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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