Heard on The Judges: "stay, stayed" > "stay, stood" & BE "stay" = always be in a given condition, etc.

[Wilson Gray]

A forty-ish black woman is suing a thirty-ish black gigolo in an
effort to get her money back.

Judge to woman:

"What is your job?"

Woman:

"I'm a social worker, your honor."

Judge to gigolo:

"And what is your job?"

Gigolo:

"My job is ..."

Woman (interrupting):

"... Pimping ME, your honor! His hand _STOOD_ shaped like a cup!"

The reference is obviously to the empty Starbuck's or random styrofoam
cup customarily used by panhandlers (why don't they have jobs handling
pans, if that's what they're called?).

And "stood" (= "stayed") refers to the fact that he was *always*
asking her for money.


In Saint Louis, we never used "stood" as the past of "stay" (I didn't
hear it in the wild till I was thirty-ish, ca.1967), but "His hand
STAYED shaped like a cup!" would have attracted attention only because
"stayed shaped like a cup" is so heavy (in the vague, old, Saint Louis
sense of "involving cerebration") compared with the tired, locally
more-usual and, hence, more-cliched "He was steady [st^dI] on the
beg." "Stay" was used in cases like, "He STAY/STAYED laid!" = "He
is/was *always* well-dressed."

-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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