"Coffee" as the name of a female slave

[Wilson Gray]

Thanks, Mark. I tried ANS for _Sandoz_, the name of a grade-school
classmate of mine and got answers all the way back to a possible
proto-Germanic origin. I tried _Swyza_ and got not a single nibble.

You never know.

-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



On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Coffee" as the name of a female slave
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 1:52 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  (snip long discussion of name "Coffee", variously spelled, and
> relevant urban sociogeography)
>
>> Does anyone know the origin of the black (to the best of my knowledge)
>> surname, "Swyza"? The bearer of this name was known as "Big Swayze."
>> Hence, until it was too late to ask, I assumed that Big's surname was
>> the same as John Cameron's.
>
> Not that it's (IMHO) out of place here, but ISTM that both of these
> topics might be *exactly* on-topic on ANS-L.
>
> OTOH, when I paused in composing this post to check ANS-L, the hot
> topic there was the use of "song /'bael at t/" to mean a written or
> printed copy of a song.
>
> If the lists are going to converge... No, let's not go there.
>
> m a m
> abusing initialisms since ICRW
>
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