Heard on The Judges, etc.

[Wilson Gray]

Twenty-ish, black female speaker:

"My sister boyfriend, who _steady been having_ her car ..."

I.e.,

"... is the person who ordinarily has had her car in his possession ..."


A family of black speakers - late-thirty-ish parents and two
late-teenaged children:

The mother and her children speak ordinary sE, lacking even black
voice - i.e., if you couldn't see them, you would think that they were
white people.
OTOH, the father is a stereotypically semi-articulate-by-sE-standards
speaker of ordinary, by-Labov-described - "_Here go_ the evidence,
your honor" - BE.

A thirty-ish, black female speaker of Obamian BE has a daughter who
speaks perfectly-ordinary sE, again with a total lack of black voice.


Clearly, an agaonizing reappraisal of the dialectology of United
States English is soon going to be necessary!


A presumably-white voice-overer for a seafood-restaurant chain keeps
pronouncing _shrimp_ as [srImp]. Back in the day, I first had to train
myself even to *hear* [Srimp]. (Bill & Nick's Shrimp
[srimp/skrimp/strimp] House was a major soul-food eatery in the Saint
Louis of my youth.) Then, I had to monitor my speech in order to teach
myself to *say* it.

As Bugs says,

"What a maroon!"

All that I had to do was to wait a few dekkids and let sE come to me.

--
-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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