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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Is that the same "though" that we're discussing. (Could be hard to tell.)


The Kardashian "though" functions this way:

A. I'm breaking up with Kim Kardashian.

B. That ass though!

Or:

C. I'll take a cab through Midtown.

D. That traffic though!

In other words, "But have you considered...?" "But what about...?" or
something similar.

That usage sounds very ordinary to me, if also very colloquial.  I can't
say when I adopted it, but certainly it 's been some decades.

JL

On Sun, Nov 16, 2014 at 10:10 AM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Sentence-final though / tho / doe
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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.=20
>
> 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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