eleventy-seven

[George Thompson]

I've been intending to post this note for these last 5 weeks or so.

A couple of years ago I posted a note on the word "forty-eleven", meaning an uncountably large number.  That post was prompted by a female perp in th 1820s -- a perpette? -- who told the magistrate that she didn't care if he sentenced her to "forty-'leven years".

The broadcasts of the Kentucky Drby and the Preakness both featured inane interviews with celebrities.  I'm so fearfully ignorant of current events that I didn't recognize any of them.  However, one lassie allowed that she had never been to the Derby (or perhaos Preakness), but that her husband had been to "eleventy-seven".
Is this a familiar variant?  Is it peculiar to her, influenced maybe by the chain of convenience stores?

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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