I'm gonna wear you out!

[Wilson Gray]

I first hard from my late maternal grandmother, a native of Longview,
TX, born ca.1896, and from any number of people my mother's age, 98,
in and around Marshall, Longview, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Houston,
Galveston, Tyler, and random other locales of East Texas. It's
probably generaly BE, since it occurs in phrases used among today's
BE-speaking youth, as it did in my youth, inphrases like, "wear that
ass out," with a broad number of meanings ranging from the ones cited
by Neal to "engage in a long, successful bout of sexual intercourse.
As Richard Pryor once put it, "You can always tell when you be done
wore that ass out, because she go to sleep!"

-Wilson

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 11:44 PM, Neal Whitman<nwhitman at ameritech.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Neal Whitman <nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â I'm gonna wear you out!
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Could someone with access to volume IV of DARE do me a favor and look up the
> idiom 'to wear s.o. out' meaning to spank, switch, hit with a belt or
> slipper, etc.? (The library here is missing its copy.) I'd like to find out
> where it's used and how long it's been around. A thread on the
> WordReference.com forum
> (http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=366049) has it as
> southeastern US English, which is consistent with attestations in literature
> and my own experience. A couple of attestations from the Alabama-set _To
> Kill a Mockingbird_ (1960). A reference the librarian here found (I can't
> find where I wrote it down right now, but I think it's something like Facts
> on File dictionary of regional English) had the earliest attestation in _Men
> Working_, a 1941 novel set in Mississippi by John Faulkner. And I first
> heard the expression from my dad, who grew up in Georgia.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Neal Whitman
> Email: nwhitman at ameritech.net
> Blog: http://literalminded.wordpress.com
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



--
-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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