"I was sitting in my mother's lap and she was cutting _me_ some cake."

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 11:48 PM, John McChesney-Young
<jmccyoung at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  John McChesney-Young <jmccyoung at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: "I was sitting in my mother's lap and she was cutting _me_
> Â  Â  Â  Â  Â  Â  Â some cake."
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, May 5, 2011 at 7:23 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> noted
> this approximate quote by Tempe Brennan:
>
>> ... Â "I was sitting in my mother's lap and she was cutting _me_ some
>> Â  Â  Â  Â  Â  Â  Â cake."
>
> I myself find this construction unexceptional, and there are 898K raw
> Ghits for "cutting me some" -slack. A fair number in the first hundred
> are food-related (e.g., ham, bread, wedding cake, biscuits). Is
> "cutting some x for me" what you expect instead?
>
> John
>
>
> --
> John McChesney-Young ** Berkeley, California, U.S.A.
> JMcCYoung~at~gmail.com ** http://twitter.com/jmccyoung **
> http://jmccyoung.blogspot.com/
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

Only 898K? Hit must not be no whole lot of Southern-English speakers
doing no posting! ;-) The point isn't that such a string is of itself
in any way strange. It's merely that a colleague here is interested in
the syntax and semantics of such strings. Perhaps, in the future, I
should post these random examples directly to him, in order to avoid
confusion.

My apologies.
--
-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