[Ads-l] New feminine name

[Jonathan Lighter]

FWIW, the two sisters in _In This Our Life_ (1942) are named Stanley (Bette
Davis) and Roy (Olivia de Havilland).

JL

On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 7:14 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 3:51 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > We've seen female "Johnnies" before, but "John" is (for now) a novelty.
>
>
> Well, as a matter of fact, one of my childhood friends had a sister called
> "John." Of course, her name was spelled _Jeanne_, the family being
> "geechies" originally from New Orleans. As far as I can tell, the kind of
> speaker that Richard Pryor referred to as "the *real* soul-brother" is
> *still* unaware of the existence of simple /ʒ/ as opposed to /dʒ/.
> "Measure" rhyming with "ledger" sounds way out even to me.
>
> OTOH, there are a lot of white people on both coasts who regard _Jeanne_ as
> the cool way to spell "Jeanie."
>
> And there's the Boston pronunciation of _Therese_ - "Tuh-raze" in my
> dialect - as "Treece"
>
> --
> -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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org