"wore black, or eat green" in 1657 Barbados

[Wilson Gray]

Re: "wore black, or eat green"

Might not this _eat_ have been pronounced "et" or be a misspelling of
"et," given that AmE is pretty much the only dialect of E in which
"eat, _et_" is non-standard?

It would then match "wore" in tense.

-Wilson

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "wore black, or eat green" in 1657 Barbados
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A (long-) 18th-century maven wrote:
>>This is a sort of crossword puzzler's hypothesis rather than an
>>informed judgment about what's going on here -- it slightly adjusts
>>theories contributed so far. I suspect that there's a kind of sly
>>double barreled joke, in that wearing black clothes and eating
>>greens rather than meat might be attributes of a simple pious
>>Christian European man -- but here Sambo wears black because he is
>>black and eats greens because he has no choice of diet.  . . . Sort
>>of like saying you know how much a fish weighs because it has scales.
>
> I responded that I think a double meaning is quite possible, and that
> further reading might reveal Ligon displaying other double meanings.
>
> Joel
>
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