Heard on The Judges: "The Man"

[Wilson Gray]

Not even jokingly. (I'm assuming that your question is not itself a
joke.) Flip Wilson, some time in the 'Sixties, is the first person
that I can recall as having used that. That was at the Redd Foxx Club
in Los Angeles. Professor Irwin Corey opened for him. The prof was the
first person that I heard use the phrase, "charter member of the
itty-bitty titty committee." He also said to a female heckler, "Get
thee to a nunnery! Or is it already too late?"

-Wilson

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:28 PM, Benjamin Zimmer
<bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on The Judges: "The Man"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 12:18 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thirty-ish, black plaintiff from Dallas, TX, describing a telephone
>> conversation:
>>
>> "He [my boss] akses me what-all was wrong with the truck. Well, I
>> tells him what was wrong, but he claim he don't understand what I'm
>> talking about. So, I gives him to _The Man_. I lets _The Man_ tell
>> him."
> [snip]
>>
>> In Texas, at least, narration or story-telling in the historical
>> present tends to bring forth the first-person -s. I remember a
>> co-worker so into the telling of a story that he not only said, "I
>> goes walking into the bar," but he also mimed the walking.
>
> Do you also get "So I says to myself, 'Self' (I says)" in those Texas
> storytelling traditions?
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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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

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