antedating "hobo" 1885

[Mark Mandel]

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 2:23 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> At 12:10 PM -0400 5/26/09, Mark Mandel wrote:
> >At 11:37 PM -0400 5/25/09, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:
> >>Laurence Horn wrote:
> >>>Does "boyo" rhyme with "yoyo"?
> >
> >>Hmm...For me, that's not <CoCo> but <C [diphthong]o>
> >
> >Sorry; I've been using angle brackets for written forms. <CoCo> means
> >a word written as any consonant letter + "o" + a consonant letter +
> >"o", and I'm looking from the perspective of a reader of the cite.
>
> Well, technically, I would argue that in <boyo>, the <y> is not a
> "consonant letter", but a vowel letter, which is why I invoked the
> diphthonginess factor. Â (Weren't we always taught that the vowels are
> "a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y"? Â And isn't this one of those times?
> Or is that just for "cycle", "by", and such?) Â So if the boyo is
> wearing a diphthong, he's got only one consonant letter to his name.
>
> LH

I don't think the 1885 readers of the cite would have been thinking in
those terms.

m a m

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