"old wise tale"/"old wives tell"

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 12:37 AM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:

> "eagle" > "iggle"


A friend at UC Davis once referred to my beard as "regal," pronouncing it
as "riggle," a fairly-common phenomenon, in my experience, as are the other
examples that Doug cites, now that my memory has been jogged, though I know
them only as eye-phonetics or from hearing them in TV and in the movies.
For some reason, I recall hearing "riggle" for "regal" in the wild on more
than one occasion. There was a black movie-theater in Saint Louis named the
"Regal" and a couple of people that I knew pronounced that name as
"Riggle," Or something like that.

There's a blues by Muddy Waters with the title, "What's the Matter With the
Meal?" But, when you listen to it, there's no doubt that the title is
actually, "What's the Matter With the Mill": "What's the matter with the
mill? The mill won't grind." It's about gender, another hunger, and not
about food.
--
-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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