'Texes' as plural of 'text (message)'

[Garson O'Toole]

Wikipedia has an entry that records several versions of the lyrics and
provides an extended exegesis on this seminal topic. Admittedly,
Hitler would have found this topic less seminal and Goebbels ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Has_Only_Got_One_Ball

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 9:54 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: 'Texes' as plural of 'text (message)'
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Feb 2, 2012, at 9:42 PM, George Thompson wrote:
>
>> Brendan Behan, in Borstal Boy, published in the early-mid 1950s, if I
>> recall, and dealing with his years in a Borstal (reform school) in England,
>> gives the song as:
>> Hitler had just one ball,/Goering had two, but very small,/Himmler had
>> something similar,/but poor Goebbals had no balls at all.
>> (Quoting from memory, and I haven't read the book for 40+ years, but I
>> doubt that I am very far off.)
>>
>> GAT
>
> If this is to the usual tune of Colonel Bogey's March, there seem to be two feet missing from the Hitler line (whence the need for the otherwise irrelevant specifiers "left" or "big", and the need for "only" rather than "just").  If it's not, I wonder what the tune was.  Or whether Brendan Behan was getting so much whisk(e)y smuggled into his Borstal (he must have gotten an early start, I figure) that he wouldn't have noticed the metrical difficulties.
>
> LH
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 9:01 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Clearly it's a matter of punctuation:
>>>
>>> Hitler had only one (left) ball.
>>>
>>> Joel
>>>
>>> At 2/2/2012 08:45 PM, Dan Nussbaum wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hitler had only one left ball.
>>>>
>>>> The version I heard said "Hitler had only one BIG ball."
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Dan Nussbaum
>>>>
>>>> ------------------------------**------------------------------
>>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>>
>>>
>>> ------------------------------**------------------------------
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> George A. Thompson
>> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
>> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.
>>
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