[Ads-l] Sentence-final though / tho / doe

[Laurence Horn]

On Nov 4, 2014, at 10:42 PM, Neal Whitman wrote:

> Anyone have anything to say about sentence-final "though / tho / doe"? I've heard it from my son and his peers, and seen it on some internet memes. On the surface, it's nothing more than the ordinary sentence-final "though", but its (possibly over-perceived) frequency, and presence in a very informal register, often in AAE-influenced language (as indicated by the "doe" spelling) make me think there's more to the story. 

An index of the meme-hood of this utterance-final "though": on last night's Saturday Night Live--which often provides a take on this sort of thing--Michael Che, one of the Weekend Update hosts kept responding to the other host's mention of the real news stories of the week (the U.S.-China climate change agreement, the continuing threat of ISIS, the Euro-spacecraft landing on the comet) by holding up the apparently widely known (but not by me) cover of Paper, an internet tabloid, featuring a rear view of Kim Kardashian and remarking "but that ass though". Turns out Urbandictionary has entries for both "that ass though" and "dat ass doe".

LH

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