"At dat time, if I'd a knew betta, we'd a copyrighted that shxt!"

[Jonathan Lighter]

It was interesting to see how long it took "bling" to become mainstream.
Theorists might have insisted that this too-obvious reduction of
"bling-bling" should have appeared almost immediately.

Of course, less than a decade is kind of "immediately" by linguistic
standards.

JL

On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "At dat time, if I'd a knew betta, we'd a copyrighted that
> shxt!"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A member of the former New Orleans rap group, The Hot Boys, which
> included Li'l Wayne, as he finishes his anecdote explaining the
> creation of, originally, _bling-bling_, later, _bling_ by Li'l Wayne
> in 1997.
>
> This jibes with my earlier typically-Wilsonic post WRT having seen a
> TV documentary re black N.O. in which some random - to me, indeed, to
> practically else over the age of twenty, even in N.O., at that time -
> local teenager who kept using the term, "bling-bling." Annoying,
> since, per my grammar and that of other Southern speakers, including
> Elvis, he should have been saying, "bli[N]-blink." Of course, I was
> assuming that the speaker was aiming for standard "blink-blink."
> However, according to the anecdote, it was _bling-bling_ "from Jump
> Street," to coin a phrase.
> --
> -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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