Heard on Springer: old-school BE; BE "BIN" (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Wilson Gray]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 6:00 PM, Mullins, Bill AMRDEC
<Bill.Mullins at us.army.mil> wrote:
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> Poster:       "Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on Springer: old-school BE; BE "BIN" (UNCLASSIFIED)
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> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
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> I believe I have heard "I done bin told you", but I don't recall if it
> was from a black speaker, or a white guy parodying AAVE.
>

Good enough for government work, I suppose. Youneverknow. IAC, it's
kinda hard to get prescriptive about non-standard speech.

FWIW, I prefer,

"I BIN done told you."

But, if someone used the sentence that you quote, I think that I could
probably control my annoyance.;-)


>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of
>> Wilson Gray
>> Sent: Friday, August 13, 2010 4:14 PM
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>> Subject: Heard on Springer: old-school BE; BE "BIN"
>>
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>> -
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
>> Subject:      Heard on Springer: old-school BE; BE "BIN"
>>
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> ------
>> -
>>
>> 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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--
-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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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org