"go figure"

J P Maher devilsbit06 at YAHOO.COM
Mon Apr 30 03:19:00 UTC 2012


Instead of presuming, we need to see loci from Jewish sources and Black English sources.   As a linguist living 40+ 40 years and taking notes in a Chicago Jewish neighborhood I'd say a Jewish origin cannot be presumed, but a corpus of TV sitcoms will show it's all over Black English.

 
At 4/29/2012 10:32 PM, J P Maher wrote:
>"Go-figure": Jewish origin is unlikely. It's scharacteristic of Black English.

But at LC suggested, "who knew" seems to be connected to Yiddish
(Google Everything).  I suspect there is a Yiddish expression with
that meaning.

Joel

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