Heard on Springer: old-school BE; BE "BIN"

[Wilson Gray]

Twenty-ish black male speaker:

"Whils' dey was fightin' ova me, I _sot_ an' watch'.


The first time that I've ever heard the, IMO till now,
semi-mythological verb-form.

Unfortunately, there was no clue, beyond "the country" (rural South)
as to where this speaker was from.


Late-thirty-ish black male speaker:

"I BIN _told_ you! I been _told_ you since Christmas!"


I didn't know that this syntactic structure, WRT to tense, existed,
till I heard John's paper on it at the first NWAV. Had I only read his
paper somewhere, so that I couldn't see that its author was black, I
would have dismissed it as nothing other than more "White Mischief,"
to quote the title of an old movie. Ain't *nobody* be saying nothing
like that!

"In *my* grammar," to coin a phrase, it ain't nothing possible b'sep':

"I BIN _telling_ you! I been _telling_ since Christmas!"
--
-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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