[Ads-l] I'd be whoever's girlfriend had the dope
Neal Whitman
nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET
Sat Sep 10 21:34:46 UTC 2016
Heard on the latest episode of the podcast "Criminal", which is a clip show celebrating 50 episodes.
One clip had a woman talking about being in a unisex prison. Men bigly outnumbered the women, which worked out well for her because she was a drug addict and, as she said, "I'd be whoever's girlfriend had the dope." Context says that the intended meaning was "I'd be the girlfriend OF whoever had the dope," but the woman used some head inflection here, putting the possesive marker on "whoever". Composing the semantics of the original utterance by the usual rules, I get this as the (unintended) meaning: "For all situations Z such that there exists a unique person X such that there exists a person Y such that Y is the girlfriend of X and Y has the dope, Y = speaker."
Later on I'll do some corpus-searching for "whoever's" to see what I get, but for now I'm just putting the attestation out here to see if it rings any bells for anyone.
Neal
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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