Heard on The Judges: "over GEOGRAPHICAL LOC"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 3:02 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'm just a-goin' over Jordan,
> > I'm just a-goin' over home.
> >   "Wayfaring Stranger" (a spiritual)
> >
> > The song, including these lines and specifically "over home", is
> > attested at least as of 1858. See
> > http://supersearch.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=23495#624401  :
>
> That's possibly why "over home" sounds somehow familiar, whereas Ray
> Charles's "over town" and the cited speaker's "over north," involving
> only location and not movement, strike me as something else.

So does the dialectal peculiarity of "way over town" explain why Elvis
changed it to "way (a)cross town" in his version of "I Got a Woman"?


--Ben Zimmer

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