Heard on The Judges: BE "nary a"

[Mark Mandel]

Put a tilde after the vowel: /n&~@~/. The tilde is a separate ASCII
character that won't (had BETTER not!) mess up any platform's
presentation.
Mark Mandel


On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Fiftyi-ish, black male speaker:
>
> "I ain't offer her _nary a_ [n&@] dime!"
>
>
> A poster to [adult swim]'s listserv for the animated cartoon, "The
> Boondocks," wrote:
>
> "so, im black nd i dnot hav _nan_ season['s DVD]"  (So, I'm black and
> I don't have the DVD of even *one* season [of "The Boondocks"].)
>
>
> It appears to me that this poster's _nan_ is an interesting effort by
> an amateur at an eye-dialect spelling of [n&@] (= "nary one," in this
> case) in which the vowels are always heavily nasalized.
>
> (BTW, how do you represent the nasalization of vowels on this listserv
> without changing the phonetics into gibberish?)
>
> -Wilson
>
> 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.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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