Heard on Springer: _what =?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=A6_?=for_ = "why"?

[Wilson Gray]

Mid-twenty-ish, black female speaker:

"What are you scared for?"

< "What for are you scared?"

wherein

_what for_  (eye-dialect _whuffo_, etc.) = "why"?


The speaker's phonology was utterly, soullessly, excruciatingly,
"standard." Hence, it occurred to me that perhaps the speaker was
hypercorrecting. That sentence-final _for_ instead of _of_ strikes me
as not quite "right," in view of the phonetics in which the sentence
was embedded. Of course,

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