Bad Girls Ride Again

[Jonathan Lighter]

I didn't bother to mention, "I swear on my mother! And I've got her face
tattooed on my motherf*****' arm!"

It looks like she does, too.  Working-class Miami white chick, age ca24.

JL

On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Bad Girls Ride Again
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > This week's crop of the new and the hard-to-Google. And did I mention
> that
> > several of the Girls are Faustian illeists?::
> >
> > "That is SO random f*****g bulls**t!" Ā  [It's senseless; "so" is an
> > odd substitute for "such"; syntactical blending?]
> >
> > "I'd never throw her under the bus! I'd never do her shame!" [Betray
> her.]
> >
>
> Sounds like something that I should be familiar with. But I'm not. :-(
>
> > "T the f**k O! How ridiculous is THAT?!" Ā [Stop this silliness!;
> accompanied
> > by time-out gesture.]
> >
> > "I'm the only BAD girl in this mother!" [Place.]
> >
> I agree that Place is the meaning of _mother[fucker]_ in this
> instance. But, in fact, its meaning varies according to context, to
> the extent that _mother[fucker] _ can replace, for all practical
> purposes, any NP whatsoever. Indeed, as such words go, it's a bad
> mother-sheh-cho-mouf!
>
> The clip, "mother," isn't its only cover (I understand that I may be
> demonstrating a misprehapprehension* of both _clip_ and _cover_ in a
> single syntactic moment, but "y'all gnawm san*, chirrin," to
> paraphrase Wilson Pickett). Another cover, very old - I heard it first
> from the mouths of my mother's male schoolmates, so I figure we must
> be talking, like, Roaring 'Twenties, when Mom would've been in high
> school - is ['mAm@ ,dZAm@], usually, IME, written as "mamma-jammer."
>
> *From listening to rappers who come from StL, I've discovered that, in
> The Lou, it's not "gnome sane," but "gnawm san." What Wilson P.
> actually said was, "Y'all know 'im, chirrin." _Misprehapprehension_
> predates Dubya. It was a catchword used by some character on an old
> radio sitcom, back in the '40's. I sorta-kinda-maybe recall the
> character's name as Lochinvar Pulaski, but that "memory" is not
> supported by either W:pedia or Google. In any case, the character was
> such a damned fool that it killed both "Lochinvar" and "Pulaski" as
> names that anyone, IMO, would willingly bear. Too bad, since, after it
> was too late, I discovered that Lochinvar was the namesake and hero of
> a poem by Scott.
>
> > "I'm really butt-hurt that somebody in the house would touch something of
> > mine." Ā [Emotionally hurt.]
> >
> > "Legalize Gay" Ā [On T-shirt,]
> >
> > One young lady, from the Boston area, is a master of the creaky voice. In
> > fact, she sounds more like a creaky-voiced "Long-Island lockjaw"
> stereotype
> > than anyone I've ever heard. Her family is very wealthy. Ā My impression
> is
> > that the creakiness is largely an affectation to express utter disdain.
> > When she's emotional about something it diminishes, though it does not, I
> > believe, Ā disappear completely. Ā The creakiness comes mainly toward the
> end
> > of sentences. More research is needed. But not done by me.
> >
>
> Does anyone else recall Jim Backus's character, Hubert Updike, III,
> from radio's old Alan Young Show? "Updike" was a rich, egotistical ("I
> wish that I had two heads, so that I could kiss myself on the back of
> the neck") snob of a playboy who spoke with a peculiar accent. The
> only time that I've heard a similar-sounding accent in the wild was at
> a party in Cambridge. It was used by the
> about-to-be-dumped-for-one-of-his-students wife of an
> internationally-famous-in-the-field-of-Indo-European-linguistics prof
> at Harvard. I immediately leaped to the conclusion that Hubert III
> speech patterns parodied those of Boston's old-money brahmins. Except
> that I have no particular evidence to support a claim that the
> now-ex-wife was a scion of a Boston-brahmin family speaking the old
> brahmin dialect, except for the fact that she sounded like a female
> Hubert Updike and was at a party in Cambridge. Indeed, I have no
> reason to think that HU3 was even supposed to be a Bostonian - well,
> his initials *are* _H[arvard]U[niversity]_ - except for the fact that
> a woman with whom I once chatted at a party in Cambridge sounded like
> him.
>
> Circular (lack of) reasoning.
>
> I really gotta start watching that show.
>
> > Another designer T-shirt reads, "Don't Hate Me 'Cause You Can't Be Me."
> >
> >
> --
> -Wilson
> ā€“ā€“ā€“
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"ā€“ā€“a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> ā€“Mark Twain
>
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