[Ads-l] _cut the slave_ redux

[Wilson Gray]

The Portable Sixties Reader - Page 468
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0142001945
Ann Charters - 2002 - ‎Fiction
... not remembering that I grew hearing her curse the factory where she
"cut uh slave" [sic]

Why the author of this, a black woman writing of her own mother, chose to
use eye-dialect - is there any speaker of AmE who would pronounce the
phrase that she quotes in any other way? - is a mystery to me.

As for "cut _a_ slave" vs. "cut _the_ slave," as I know the expression,
it's just one of those things, I reckon. I have a friend who's been being
driven up _a_ wall instead of up _the_ wall since at least 1973. Plenty of
speakers point to the spot where they draw _a_ line instead of drawing
_the_ line.

Youneverknow.

-- 
-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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