Heard on The Judges: stay, stood

[Wilson Gray]

Latino 18-year-old male speaker;

"I didn't want to see [my girlfriend and child] thrown out on the
street, so that's why I _stood_ on the lease."


_Stay, stood_ is a *lot* more common than I would have thought. When I
first heard it in the 'Forties catch-phrase, "I should have _stood_ in
bed!", I couldn't even understand it. Why would a person want to stand
in his bed, as opposed to lying in it, and what was funny about that?

I didn't understand it till a Geechee named "Roussell" that I met in
the Security Agency Reserve in Los Angeles said to me, "Man, when I
was stationed at Fort Polk, (Louisiana,) I _STOOD_ in New Orleans!"

Somehow, I then  flashed on the fact that he meant "stayed" and not
literally "stood" as I understand it. That was the first time that I
had ever heard "stood" so used in the wild. But, as is so often
weirdly the case, after that, I began to hear it everywhere.

According to J.L. Dillard,

I shoulda ... stood in bed

        This clowning expression of self-disgust at 'one of those
days' comes from the imigrant generation's confusion of ;stood' and
'stayed' — due to the fact that Yiddish _shtey[en]_ means both 'stay'
and 'stand'. Boxing promoter Joe Jacobs is supposed to have been
responsible for spreading it around the country a generation ago.

I think that Dillard may be correct WRT the expression. But, among
blacks and Latins, such speakers, when they use "stood," simply use it
as the past of "stay" in exactly the same way that I use "stayed."
It's simply the past tense of "stay," nothing more and nothing less. I
suspect that the same is also true of people who use Yiddishisms.

-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

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