"Let's get you that tattoo finished."

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Thu Apr 28 01:55:36 UTC 2011


On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 6:45 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> My first encounter with this was in an old Appalachian mountain
> moonshiner ballad sung by Joan Baez on one of her early (1963?)
> albums, "Copper Kettle":
>

"Merciful speed!" as my mother says. (I have no idea what, if
anything, the exclamation refers to.) That's two whole years *after*
the time of my anecdote. And i don't think that Joan Baez was singing
in her home dialect.I'll bet that you've never heard of the old radio
program, "Stick-Buddy Jamboree," dedicated to C&W, either. Hail.
Prolly don' even now know that the legendary Ferlin Husky, of A
Dear-John Letter  and Stan Freberg's "A little more Husky in the
Ferlin!" fame, was from Saint Louis, where his music was often
featured on Gran'pappy Jones's C&W show. What about Roy Acuff's
monumental movie, Night Train To Memphis and its theme song of the
same title?

Nothing?

But, seriously. There was truly a time when a sentence like

"Get you a tray"

would have been worthy of notice?

Youneverknow.

--
-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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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