Heard on the street:

[Geoff Nathan]

Interesting.  In Hawaiian English 'one time' means 'immediately', 'instantly'.  So when my native HE karate instructor was trying to get us white belts to stop wiggling after we finished a step forward with punch, he'd say
'Stop one time'.  It took me a while living there (I eventually became a competent second language speaker) to figure out what it meant.

Geoff

Geoffrey S. Nathan
Faculty Liaison, C&IT
and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
+1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
+1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)

----- "Wilson Gray" <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> From: "Wilson Gray" <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Sent: Saturday, July 4, 2009 3:57:20 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Heard on the street:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Heard on the street:
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Thirty-ish black speaker:
>
> "I'm going to have to shake a monkey _one time_ on this son of a
> bitch."
>
>
> I have no idea what "shake a monkey" means, having heard it only that
> one time, though I could make a WAG. However, I'm just noting an
> instance of the use of of "one time" as an intensifier that has
> nothing to do with time or with the number of instantiations of an
> action. Back in the 'Fifties in Saint Louis, when cigarette-smoking
> was merely hip, as opposed to being a full-blown habit, among studs
> of
> my age group,
>
> Say, man! Why don't you save me the short, one time?
>
> I.e., don't discard the butt of that Philip Morris. Pass it over to
> me
> so that I can smoke it. Period. Not just this one time.
>
> Let me hold a Benny Franklin, one time?
>
> I.e., lend me a half-dollar. (In real life, the sentence would be,
> "Lend me half-a-dollar, one time.")
>
> Of course, this could also be used in the standard manner, as in the
> famous, "One time, when I was at band camp ..." "Proper English" is
> always recognized as grammatically correct, though, in certain cases,
> it might not be recognized as socially correct, whether positively:
> "heavy," or negatively: "lame."
>
> I'm still talking about Saint Louis in the 'Fifties, of course, when
> didn't urrbody say no "urrbody" and didn't nobody know where Natural
> Bridge Road was.
>
> -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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org