Origin of the term "the dozens"

[P L Patrick]

i forgot to mention that there are some good recent discussions of
these matters out there too. In the excellent 1998 book African
American English (Mufwene, Rickford, Bailey & Baugh, eds), Marcy morgan
gives a very useful contextualization and theorization of some related
ways of speaking, "More than a mood or an attitude: Discourse and
verbal genres in African-American culture". She discusses at least
SOUNDIN'/SIGNIFYIN', READIN', and INSTIGATIN', as well as the DOZENS,
in terms of directness and intentionality.
	These have in common an orientation to conflict talk (whether
PLAYIN' or not), which is sometimes negatively perceived, and -- by a
leap of bad logic -- they are sometimes conflated with other types of
speech that are also negatively valued or related to conflict. (E.g.
use of obscenities or "uncensored language", see Arthur Spears's
article in the same volume.)
	I wouldn't be surprised if, although community members know how
to recognize and respond in practice, they blur the lines of
distinction when asked to define, name or explain practices. This seems
natural because they may naturally make the jump from a member of a
category (insult rituals -- themselves just a member of a larger
category, of verbal modes of confrontation) to the category itself.
	Still, the practices remain distinct, although there are some
which seem to have more than one name (soundin'=signifyin'). One reason
why it's important to distinguish these genres in e.g. our teaching and
emailing-- lumping together may lead to no-good. just trying to keep
discussion from "going general" in a negative way-- as it so often does
when AAE speech forms are discussed in mixed groups...

Some other good references on the topic, esp for the DOZENS, include:

Abrahams, Roger D. 1962. "Playing the dozens." Jrl of American Folklore
75: 209-218.
--- 1976. Talking Black. Rowley, MA: Newbury House Publishers.

Kochman, Thomas. 1983. "The boundary between play and nonplay in black
verbal dueling." Language in Society 12: 329-37.

Labov, William. 1972. "Rules for Ritual Insults." Language in the Inner
City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, Chap. 8. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.

Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia L. 1970. Language behavior in a Black urban
community. Ph.D. dissertation. University of California at Berkeley.

Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia L. 1972. "Signifying and marking: Two
Afro-American speech acts." John J. Gumperz & Dell Hymes, eds.,
Directions in sociolinguistics. New York: Blackwell, 161-79.

Morgan, Marcyliena. 1993. "The Africanness of counterlanguage among
Afro-Americans." In S. Mufwene, ed., Africanisms in Afro-American
language varieties: 423-435. Athens: University of Georgia.

Smitherman, Geneva. 1993. "If I'm Lyin', I'm Flyin' ". Introduction to
The Art of the Snap [sorry, I don't have a reference for this book --
just an excerpt from it -- but would very much like to!].

Prof. Peter L. Patrick
Dept. of Language & Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER CO4 3SQ
U.K.

Tel: (from within UK) 01206.87.2088
    (from outside UK) +44.1206.87.2088
Fax: (as above)           1206.87.2198
Email: patrickp at essex.ac.uk
Web: http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp