"phonetically"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Mar 6 20:14:02 UTC 2013


On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 9:36 AM, Lisa Galvin <lisagal23 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> "phonetically", that is, without understanding what the words meant.

Nobody ever explained it to me that way, before! It seems - now -
fairly obvious that what Foxx was trying to say was something along
the lines of: though he could "say" Latin, as it were, and understood
what the few Latin words used in church meant, he had no ability
literally to speak that language.

OTOH, he did say it as though he were bragging: "I'm Chevy Chase. And
you're not." Perhaps his point was,

"*I* spoke Latin *phonetically* [and *y'all* don't know no *parts* of
no Latin!/don't even understand what I'm talking about]!"

Works for me.

--
-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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