[Ads-l] Heard on Jerry Springer: miscellanea

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Thu Dec 21 01:17:37 UTC 2017


Forty-ish black man from Cincinnatee - of which the great Gerald Norman
Springer, renowned reality-TV personality, was once the mayor - asks his
stuff:

"How long we been _joogin'_?

I.e. "How long we been fuckin'?" It got past the censor unbleeped, of
course. Like _dookie_, some years ago, _joog_ is commonly used in Marshall,
Texas, replacing _fuck_, just as _dookie_ replaces _shit_. Since I haven't
been in Marshall since 1955, those verbal Presents may need to be Pasts. As
is the case with _dookie_, Marshall is the only place that I've ever heard
anyone use the word, before today.

_Joog_, with the _oo_ of "book," is treated in HDAS under _juke_ and is
cited in Green's under _joog_.

Since both of these words are common enough to show up in dictionaries,
it's weird that I've heard them used only in what was once the
fourth-largest city in Texas, but is now just an East Texas backwater.

Thirty-ish black woman threatens another one, both from Cincinnatee and
fighting over the man cited above:

"If I catch you on the corner, I'm gon' _tap that ass_!"

This, too, glided easily past the censors, of course. This is only the
second time that I've heard the canonical version - i.e. _tap *that* ass_,
instead of _tap ass_ - on TV. But it's the first time that I've heard it
reanalyzed as a version of _*kick* that ass_ -  instead of being misused as
a euphemism for _fuck_, not even as strong as _screw_. As I've mentioned,
there was a time when, if anything, _fuck_ was a euphemism for _tap that
ass_. But, since it's leapt the color bar, all the color has been drained
out of it

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



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