Youneverknow

[Wilson Gray]

Back in Saint Louis, we used to play a card game, a member of the
rummy family, called "tonk." The bruz and cuz from Downtown, who spoke
a slightly different, more-Southern variety of the local BE, called
the game "tunk." This was unremarkable and even expected. Those studs
said "d[^]nkey" for "donkey," but "m[O]nkey" for "monkey" and had
other such trivial but distinctive differences in their speech that
ID'd their home 'hood.

When I was in the Army, I offered to teach my redundantly-white
barracks-mates to play it. After a couple of hands, one of the other
players exclaimed,

"Hey, I *know* this game! It's called 'tunk'!"

Yeah, that's right. … Wait, WHAT?!

The game can be found in any Hoyle under the rubric, _Tunk_.

Youneverknow.

--
-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