Pants on the Ground

Thu Jan 28 11:17:29 UTC 2010

Prez Obama gave a great speech last night.  It's the first time I've heard a president go after bankers.  Now he's got bankers and doctors after him.  That's a lot of bucks.  Could be trouble ahead for the dems on the money side.  Dialectically, the Prez like his predecessor often says ~s for words ending in "s" where ~z is standard.  Seems to be a big trend, but not so good.  "Eyes" become "ice".  Can create confusion.

Regarding the sound ~or (more, or, floor), dictionaries don't even include it as a phoneme.  In truespel it's an "r" influenced vowel.  The sound comes between "oh" (where some USA folks say "more" as mohr ~moer) and "awe" (where some folks in UK say "maw" with a dropped "r" ~mau.)  Between moh(r) and maw(r) is ~mor.

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL7+
see truespel.com phonetic spelling

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> Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:29:20 -0500
> From: hwgray at GMAIL.COM
> Subject: Re: Pants on the Ground
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Wilson Gray
> Subject: Re: Pants on the Ground
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> It's just the usual half-assed bullshit, Neal. Nothing there is true
> of Black English as a whole, with the possible single exception that
> _your_ is almost always pronounced [yo] by all speakers, at least when
> not delivering the State of The Union address.
>
> Why it is that white people are unable to hear the pronunciation of
> the "l" in "cool," etc. is a mystery to me. I've seen "cool"
> represented by "coo' " in literature written by whites since I was in
> high school in the '50's. When I was in the Army and Greg asked me to
> teach him to pronounce "cool" as we Negroes (in those days) did, when
> I said "cool", he repeated it as "coo," despite the fact that he was
> listening to a native speaker in real life in real time.
>
> OTOH, why do whites choose to pronounce "-ool" as "-oowul"? You have
> no idea how messed-up that sounds! ;-)
>
> In a beer commercial of the '80's, this pronunciation was gently
> mocked. A nouveau-riche black athlete has his boyz from the old 'hood
> over to his new Bel-Air crib. When he invites them to see "the
> poo-wul," filled with cans of the advertised brand of beer, his
> friends recoil in horror, echoing, "The 'poo-wul'?!!!"
>
> I wonder why it is that the BE "long T," as I call it, never makes the
> various lists of reputed "features" of BE? I would have thought that,
> like much else, the long T would be familiar from the old TV show, In
> Living Color. Remember "Wanda" and her catchphrase, _I'm [rEt:@]
> (ready to) go!_? I've heard it used by any number of people: my
> father, a roommate, a broad selection of other family and friends,
> random utter strangers on the street. When I think of my father,
> "[pUt:] (Put it) on the table" pops into my mind. But, as In Living
> Color's parody showed, the long T is "non-standard," or, as the fact
> that I don't use it, though my father, who died seven years ago at 97,
> did, old-fashioned or too "country." The former roommate who uses it
> came to L.A. straight out of the tobacco [t at b&@k@] fields of North
> Carolina. I, OTOH, spent almost the entirety of my
> language-developmental years in urban, semi-Northern Saint Louis,
> being embarrassed by my parents' Southern accents. (My father had
> "wif, bofe," etc., but my mother, now 97, doesn't, having always used
> the standard thorn.)
>
> [BTW, even as I type, I'm watching a TV show on what's now known to
> the greater world as "South-Central Los Angeles." The speech of
> *every* black speaker is fully rhotic, with a single exception.
> _Nigger_ always be pronounced only as "nigga." A major change, that.
> When I moved to L.A. from Saint Louis in the '50's, it used to make my
> flesh crawl to hear black Angeleños say r-ful "nigger," just like
> white people. Fortunately, the mirror-image spelling-pronunciation,
> "reggin," was hip, then, so that I didn't have to hear "nigger" even
> from the bruz 'n' cuz, all the time. Unfortunately, the r-ful version
> resurfaced, after "reggin" became stale. OTOH, according to the UD,
> "reggin" is back, in white slang terms like _reggin weed_, meaning
> something like "stale, low-THC, or otherwise worthless marijuana."]
>
> -Wilson
>
> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 10:26 AM, nwhitman at ameritech.net
> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>> Poster: "nwhitman at ameritech.net"
>> Subject: Pants on the Ground
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> New blog post, on several features of AAVE present in "Pants on the Ground" -- and one that's not, although a lot of people seem to think it is.
>> http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/witcha-pants-on-the-ground/
>>
>> Neal Whitman
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
> --
> -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
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