Heard on The Judges: _BIN done_

[Wilson Gray]

Forty-ish, black male speaker from Saint Louis:

If he had gave me the tax check like he said was, he _would have BIN
done pay_ me back!"


I've read John's work on AAVE _BIN_ in strings like

"He _BIN pay_ me back!"

with, IIRC, the meaning,

"he paid me back a long time ago."

Now, I personally would never say anything like that and I have never
heard such a syntactic structure in the wild. However, the last time
that I mentioned this, the post was forwarded to John. I found this
very embarrassing, because of the possible implication that I was
challenging John's work.

I am doing *no* such thing! As everyone knows, Saint Louis is (was?) a
dialect island. In Saint Louis, we say (or *said*; I have to keep in
mind that anything that I claim to be a feature of any Saint Louis
(sub)dialect is valid only to 1962, the last year for which I can
claim residence in that once-great city):

"He _BIN done pay_ me back"

with exactly the same meaning as the John-type string. Of course, in
Saint Louis, people do/did also use

"He _BIN payin_ me back!"

with the meaning

"He started paying me back a long time ago."

-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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