McWhorter on "Negro" [Was: on "Negro English"]

[Laurence Horn]

At 7:17 PM -0500 1/16/10, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>Um, a slight (slight? ha!) chronological mis-step -- all the references in
>my previous post should have read to *the (late) eighteenth [sic] century*,
>not the nineteenth century.
>
>"De Nite Afore Larry Was Stretched" can be pretty closely dated to the 1780s
>in Dublin.  Given that it's one of the relatively few major street cant
>texts which *can be so precisely located, how I managed to shove it a
>hundred years into the future beats me.
>
>Apologies everyone.
>
>Robin Hamilton
>
>>I eventually found it -- and as far as I know, it's *still the only place
>>other than the original sources where the "correct" text is given -- in
>>Andrew Carpenter, _Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland_
>>(Cork,
>>Ireland: Cork University Press, 1998), pages 430-445.  Carpenter gives his
>>sources, and prints three other poems from Dublin in the late nineteenth
>>century
>
>                                [OUCH!!!!!!]

Hey, you don't get to say ouch--you don't have to imagine yourself
getting stretched...


Larry

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org