follow-up on "piling on"

[Wilson Gray]

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 2:06 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â follow-up on "piling on"
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> on "and plus besides:
>
> http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/piling-on/
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Very interesting! But it's a source of minor annoyance that you always
have to ask yourself, Is it *really* the case that X is peculiar to
black speech/to white speech? Or is it the case that I've simply never
had occasion to hear any white people/any black people speaking in the
wild?

It's a good thing that I do this just for fun! Can you imagine what a
hassle it is to try to discover whether a word or a turn of phrase is
peculiar to BE as opposed to being just plain, ordinary Southern?
Like, I was truly startled to discover that, e.g.

(approx.) _tee-NINE-shih_ "very small, teeny-tiny"

falls just as trippingly from the tongues of white West Texans as it
does from the tongues of black East Texans. Who'd-a thunk it?
--
-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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