_hep_ vs. _hip_, trivially revisited

[Ron Butters]

When I was a child, my great-uncle-by-marriage, CW Toms, who was a veteran minor army officer of WWI took great pleasure at family get-togethers in forcing my brothers and me to march around the dining table to his "hut-2-3-4" commands. But he may also have been saying "hup" some of the time. In any case,  it was definitely a mid-central vowel followed by a nonback voicerless consonant. Given that "2" begins with a /t/, it would not be impossible that "hup" would be perceived as, and even artuculated as, "hut" and vice versa, and indeed the final consonant could come out sometimes as an indeterminable glottal stop.

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------Original Message------
From: Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Date: Sunday, December 11, 2011 7:03:02 PM GMT-0500
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] _hep_ vs. _hip_, trivially revisited

On Sun, Dec 11, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Berrey & Van den Bark

Clearly, then, these two had were never "nervous in the service"!
Surely, no one who has ever considered the mind-numbing boredom of a
two-hour session of dismounted drill could possibly consider "HEP!"
hep!

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