shkeevy; bubbies; more!

[Jonathan Lighter]

Two final housewifisms:

I am like a bull in candy shop! [i.e., can be formidable, or violent if
necessary]

I am tough as balls!

The ladies are extremely well-to-do and live in mansions.

JL



On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 9:52 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: shkeevy; bubbies; more!
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> FWIW, it was 1953 when I first heard the word said. It was pronounced
> [bUbz], which, since it was used by a fellow BE-speaker, I took to be
>  "bulbs." I hadn't yet learned the "boobs" form, discussion of women's
> breasts being rare among colored fellows. As Garrett Morris pointed
> out, we "lak a gal wiff a big butt." That being the case, I never had
> occasion to speak the hypercorrected "bulbs" form. Hence, I was never
> corrected and didn't discover that "bubs" was the correct word, until
> I came across it while browsing through HDAS.Once, I knew two
> different women called "Vickie." The magnificently-busted one was
> referred to as "Knobs," whenever it became necessary to distinguish
> the two. At the summer, 1971, LSA linguistic institute, I came to know
> a woman mammoth of bust who was known as "Big-Boob Barbara." At that
> time, "boob" finally became an active part of my vocabulary.
>
> "Boobies" is heard all the time on sitcoms, as I'm probably not the
> first to have noticed.
>
> As fate would have it, a couple of dekkids or so later, B-B Barbara
> had grown up to be the CEO - under a different name, needless to say -
> of her own company, thereby earning a feature spread on the first page
> of the business section of the local broadsheet. I was very much
> surprised - not that she had become a success, of course, but that it
> should be someone that I knew personally - and impressed. It was
> almost like the time when [namedrop] Barry Commoner, an old family
> friend, made the cover of TIME. *And* he's in Wikipedia.
>
> -Wilson
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 7:42 PM, Jonathan Lighter<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> > Sender: Ā  Ā  Ā  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster: Ā  Ā  Ā  Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject: Ā  Ā  Ā shkeevy; bubbies; more!
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > For some reason I don't usually watch Bravo's _Real Housewives of New
> > Jersey_. Ā Anyway, they're real all right, with many typical NY/NJ
> linguistic
> > features. And boy, do they use 'em!
> >
> > One Italian-American housewife likes to use the adjective "shkeevy." Ā A
> > viewer complained that it was "so '70s." Ā However, the only form of the
> word
> > I've encountered is "skeevy," without the [S].
> >
> > She and one or two of the others also prefer [bUbiz] for the far more
> usual
> > [bubiz]. I've never heard that pronunciation before, but it is apparently
> a
> > survival of the very common 19th C. {bubbies}, which in my experience has
> > become obsolete in print (in favor of the vocalically ambiguous
> {boobies})
> > except in pseudo-Victorian um-literature.
> >
> > And after several housewives ganged up on another in a strident argument,
> > she told the camera, "I was sitting there getting literally gangbanged."
> >
> > JL
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> ā€“ā€“ā€“
> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org