"Will _SANG 4_ FOOD"

[Jonathan Lighter]

> A man who's computer-literate, but who's not "grammar"-literate?

Welcum 2 the future!

JL


On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 9:48 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "Will _SANG 4_ FOOD"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Sign carried by a homeless black man in Florence, South Carolina. Caps as
> in the original.
>
> What's of interest - to me, anyway - is that a speaker unable to
> distinguish "sing" from "sang," presumably because his dialect recognizes
> no such distinction, nevertheless uses "4" for "for," despite the fact that
> BE *does* distinguish between "4" [foU] and "for" [fO(r)] / [f^(r)] and, in
> the St. Louis BE of my lost youth, "for" falls together with "far," as
> expected.
>
> Like, I *still* trip over "4" in place of "for," in reading. But, I *never*
> confuse "sing" and "sang" in writing.
>
> A man who's computer-literate, but who's not "grammar"-literate?
>
> Youneverknow.
>
> [The classification of this comment is ;-). This comment is classified
> ;-).]
>
> --
> -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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