flyting and rap

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:35 AM -0500 1/6/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>By God, he's found it: te lost chord! And , of course, in their spare
>time, it was often the case that the slaves - those lazy jacksanapes!
>- chose to use their spare time relaxing and watching their masters
>play at words in a language easily understood by them, motivated by
>the lash as they were, but that has since become unintelligble,
>somehow, to native speakers of that same language.
>
>It reminds of an exhange in an old movie re-run of the Comedy Channel
>just this morning:
>
>White cop:
>
>"And a bag of nose rings."
>
>Be-nose-ringed whigger clerk:

Do you have a semantic distinction between "whigger" and "wigger",
Wilson?  (I seem to recall you have a phonological distinction
between them.)  It's really close on google:  717K and 732K hits
respectively, without getting into the -a as opposed to -er versions.

LH

>
>"What're you talking about?"
>
>Cop:
>
>"Nothing. I was just making a joke."
>
>Whigger:
>
>"Well, knock yourself out, man."
>
>Cop:
>
>"What's that supposed to mean?"
>
>It demonstrates how easy it is for members of one racial group to
>understand the ingroup speech of members of another racial group,
>though both are members of the same racial group, and even when both
>speakers were born and reared in the same city, in this case, NYC.
>
>-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 Mon, Jan 5, 2009 at 1:19 PM, Amy West <medievalist at w-sts.com> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Amy West <medievalist at W-STS.COM>
>>  Subject:      flyting and rap
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  A museum colleague forwarded this link to me:
>>
>>>
>>>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/3998862/Rap-music-originated-in-medieval-Scottish-pubs-claims-American-professor.html
>>
>>  I don't know much about rap's origins beyond the connection to
>>  playing the nines, but I'm skeptical of this claim based simply on
>>  the fact that there are probably (again I come up against my
>>  ignorance) many African analogues of flyting that are much more
>>  likely candidates for playing the nines ancestry.
>>
>>  I know that there are Old English and Old Norse analogues as well, so
>>  why limit it to medieval Scotland?
>>
>>  And the 1861 poem that is cited could easily be influenced by those
>>  OE and ON analogues as that's the time period for the rise of OE & ON
>>  philology (and there was plenty of use of medieval literature in that
>>  time period: a couple of colleagues have looked at the use of King
>>  Arthur in popular literature from both the Union and the Confederacy).
>>
>>  Anyone more knowledgeable and better informed than me willing to weigh in?
>>
>>  ---Amy West
>>
>>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
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