People Mag v. "Honey Boo Boo"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Aug 18 20:08:35 UTC 2012


"The Thompsons['] Southern-accented [speech] is accompanied by
_patronizing_ subtitles …"

*My* feeling, precisely.

FWIW, "Boo-Boo" is apparently widespread, Down Home, as a nickname for
girls and for quite some time. Back in Marshall, in the '30's and
'40's, no one ever used the true first name of the neighbor-girl
universally referred to only as "Boo-Boo (Green)." And "honey-chile'
was (still is?) a recognized Southernism. One of the characters on the
soap-opera comic strip, Jane Arden, was a young Southern woman known
among her co-workers only as "Honey-Chile." (In StL BE, out of step as
usual, we used "honey-*baby*.")

--
-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



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