Hoarse, four, mourning etc.

[Wilson Gray]

And, of course, WRT to Saint Louis, you also have my word for it. ;-)
Well, to the early '60's, anyway. I often have to remind myself of my
tendency toward mental time-travel into the past, regarding much of my
irrefutable anecdotal evidence. <har! har!>

Of course, the exception is my tirades against the melioration of
_pimp_. Having been there and attempted to do that - "It's hard to be
a pimp!" - I can assure you that the OED "definition" is incorrect
verging on being an outright lie. Some things have to be experienced.
What someone may have noted in the works of e.g. "Iceberg Slim" or
even in Black Players, gives an *extremely* distorted and *generous*
view of what a pimp is.

Of course, if the fact of the matter is that the OED is meant to trace
merely the *historical, literary uses* of words and *not* their *true
meanings*, my deepest and sincerest apologies to the OED and its
compilers.

Well, in the case of _pimp_, I still can't give the OED et al. any
credit, there being plenty of throw-away paperbacks and publications
of the "men's-magazine" type that describe pimps and pimping
accurately. And, in this case, I *don't* take into consideration that
pimps and pimping may have changed, beyond today's stereotypical
flamboyancy (back in the day, a pimp dressed like the "businessman"
that he called himself and his 'ho's maintained the same standard of
"class") over the past half-century and that I, sadly, am unaware of
it. Unless the compilers of the OED know from their own experience
that, for them, pimping is easy, the OED definition of _pimp_ is so
misleading that it ought to be expunged.

Whether you speak of "The Life," as it was known in the '60's, or of
"The Game," as is heard today, if you really haven't experienced it -
or even merely *heard* about it - you simply have *no* idea! The
cartoon character, a pimp who uses "A Pimp Called 'Slickback'" as his
"sporting name" - back in the day, big pimps (three whores, providing
him with an income of about $2500/mo. in 1965 dollars) like Tommy
James, my mentor and a fellow East-Texan, used his own name; if anyone
was going to be arrested, it was going to be one of his ho's, so why
would *he* need a sporting name to hide behind? - who has his *own
grandmother* clicking heels on The Stroll to get him "his" money, is
closer to the correct definition of _pimp_.

[Jesse et al., I'm fully aware that there is no response to random
"You-don't-know-what-you're-talking-about!" tirades, even when they're
from your Facebook friends. ;-)]

-Wilson


On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Gordon, Matthew J.
<GordonMJ at missouri.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Hoarse, four, mourning etc.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I don't think boar/bore and board/bored are part of this historical contrast. Boar, bore and board are listed by Wells (1982) as members of the FORCE group, deriving from long open o in Middle English. Bored isn't listed there.
>
> St. Louis traditionally maintains the contrast including between 'for' & 'four,' 'morning' & 'mourning,' 'or' & 'ore,' etc. The Atlas of North American English has acoustic evidence to illustrate the contrast.
>
>
> On 6/29/10 8:36 AM, "Geoff Nathan" <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU> wrote:
>
> As others have noted, the 'horse:hoarse' contrast has been extensively discussed on this list, and in the dialectological literature. It is one of a small number of similar examples ('boar:bore, board:bored' for example) that continue to contrast in parts of the midwest and southern US. A competent discussion can be found here
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_r#Horse-hoarse_merger
>
>
> unfortunately there are no sound samples for the contrast. The OED says that RP still distinguishes them as a contrast between long open-o and open-o schwa. I believe this has disappeared, however.
>
>
> The other two (for:four, morning:mourning) are identical in all contemporary dialects I'm aware of, and their etymologies suggest that they fell together long ago (the former), or were never different (the latter, at least from Middle English times). There is some dispute about this, however.
>
>
> Geoff
>
> Geoffrey S. Nathan
> Faculty Liaison, C&IT
> and Associate Professor, Linguistics Program
> +1 (313) 577-1259 (C&IT)
> +1 (313) 577-8621 (English/Linguistics)
>
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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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