Subject: ADS-L Digest - 28 Jun 1997 to 29 Jun 1997 There are 3 messages totalling 125 lines in this issue. Topics of the day: 1. MIKE TYSON SPECIAL: Bite 2. galore 3. Noises ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 29 Jun 1997 03:01:07 -0400 From: "Barry A. Popik" Bapopik[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]AOL.COM Subject: MIKE TYSON SPECIAL: Bite "Another one bites the dust." --Queen Mike Tyson got disqualified today by biting Evander Holyfield. When asked why he did this twice, he responded, "FIGHT? This was a world championship FIGHT? That's very different! I thought Don King said--" Fighters often claim to "chew up" their opponents (RHHDAS has boxing references for this); some even "eat them for breakfast." Fighters usually don't do this literally!! The word "bite" itself has been big the past twenty years, perhaps helped by the "byte" and by the sexual innuendo. Bart Simpson or Beavis and Butthead might say that something really "bites." A recent movie was called REALITY BITES. A recent David Letterman joke was "bite me," and Letterman asked, "Can we say 'bite me' on tv?" In baseball, a player who swings at a ball in the dirt "goes fishing." RHHDAS has a baseball "bite" as "a hard swing at a pitched ball," with only one 1914 citation and no explanation. The term clearly comes from fishing and may have been popularized in connection with the crazy pitcher Rube Waddell, who often missing games to go fish. Paul Dickson's BASEBALL DICTIONARY has this from 1905. RHHDAS has "bite the bullet" from 1891. I think this comes from powder tubes that had to be bitten to quickly reload, and it's probably much earlier than this date, since the rifles date from the 1850s. RHHDAS has "bite the big one" from 1977, although I remember it a bit earlier. This refers to fellatio as the "big one." There is a nice RHHDAS entry on "big one," but it surprisingly omits the famous song by Tom Lehrer--"Let's drop the big one now! Let's drop the big one now!"--that antedates its "atomic destruction" entries. A check of the New York Public Library's CATNYP titles (from 1972) shows a book called BITE HARD (1997) about male homosexuality. This, I suppose, would also be about "biting the big one." "Bite your lip" is not in RHHDAS; it's probably the still innocent "shut your mouth!" "Biters and the Bitten, or Biting in All Trades" is the title of a London broadside ballad from 1844. I haven't had a chance to go to the NYPL to check the lyrics. The ballad itself is a takeoff from the Aesop fable "A Biter Bit" (page 60 in the Penguin edition), where a snake bites into a file at a smith's workshop and receives a comeuppance. "Bite" has come a long way, from fishing to baseball to sex to computers and now to boxing. It probably deserves a full treatment, but I haven't time. "...And in this corner, Mike 'the Cannibal' Tyson!!!" Nah, I still wouldn't pay fifty bucks. ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Jun 1997 09:37:48 -0400 From: "Dennis R. Preston" preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]PILOT.MSU.EDU Subject: Re: galore Larry, I'm not sure what level of variation you are looking for, but I have an odd distinction between having things 'up the wazoo' (with considerable phonetic variation, e.g., 'kazoo,' 'gazoo,' but only velars I note) when I am really fed up with whatever it is. Such things may be mass or even abstract. (I've had it with semantics; I've got semantics up the wazoo!) But 'out the wazoo' is a different matter; there I seem to have only an abundance (and it need not be annoying, but must be concrete and count). (The weather's been so nice this year that we've got flowers out the wazoo. *I like phonetics. I've got it out the wazoo.) The source of the negative sense of 'up' seems obvious, but I wonder if my contrast in both sense and the kind of NP which can be referred to is matched by others. DInIs This is a response to a recent Linguist posting from Jules, which follows. (I assume this is a fit topic for the list.) I just read, belatedly, Alan Harris's communication re punctuation. What struck me was not the inappropriate "'", but the word 'galore'. What the heck is that? Is it an obligatorily post-posed adjective? Is it unique in English? It can't be a matter of idiomatic phrases, since it seems to me it can be added to noun plural or mass noun: Come out to our ranch, we've got horses galore, cattle galore, sheep galore, etc. Not to mention that notoriously yclept girlfriend/moll of James Bond a few decades back... I assume (and Webster's corroborates) that 'galore' is indeed a postposed adjective, and it's not unique in this status. 'aplenty', though it can also be an adverb, occurs in the same adjectival frames as 'galore', with the same quantificational flavor (sheep/horses/cattle aplenty), and at least for me prepositional phrases like 'up the wazoo' (there are others, I'm sure) are in the same ballpark. Any other intuitions, dialect variants, etc. out there? --Larry Dennis R. Preston Department of Linguistics and Languages Michigan State University East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA preston[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]pilot.msu.edu Office: (517)432-1235 Fax: (517)432-2736 ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 29 Jun 1997 18:27:42 -0500 From: Grant Barrett gbarrett[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]JERRYNET.COM Subject: Noises I have read comparitive studies of how animal sounds are interpreted in different languages, but I wonder if there is any recent work on other meaningful sounds? What brings this to mind is the crowd response to last night's movie trailers. As the movie was Face/Off at 12:40 a.m. (yes, in the morning), it was a young, male crowd. Whenever a good trailer played there was the usual "woohoo" and the exclamatory "yeah!" and the appreciative exhalation of air that sounds like blowing on soup and seem to be a version of the "whew" of relief. But it was the response to the bad trailers that interests me: it was the sound of a buzzer, like that heard on game shows when the contestant loses, kind of an "errrnh". There was also the "puh", a scoffing small burst of air through the lips. Is there a record of "new" sounds? I'm looking for something beyond raspberries, tsk, chup, umm (the child's "I'm telling"), a ha, oh, etc. One other sound that I find interesting is the largely male "huuaw", an slow aspirated exhalation from the back of the throat. It's usually given in appreciation of something cool or beautiful, and seems to be related to the "ohhs" and "ahhs" of a fireworks-watching crowd. Grant Barrett gbarrett[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]dfjp.com ------------------------------ End of ADS-L Digest - 28 Jun 1997 to 29 Jun 1997 ************************************************ From - Tue Jul 01 18:46:44 1997 Received: from acs1.byu.edu by alaska.et.byu.edu; Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:01:10 -0600 (MDT) Received: from DIRECTORY-DAEMON by yvax.byu.edu (PMDF V5.1-8 #16477) id 01IKP6DTRPGW003HYL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]yvax.byu.edu for lilliek[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]et.byu.edu; Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:01:00 MDT Received: from listmail.cc.uga.edu ("port 2275"[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]listmail.cc.uga.edu) by yvax.byu.edu (PMDF V5.1-8 #16477) with ESMTP id 01IKP6DOTL6O0031DT[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]yvax.byu.edu for dianel[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]byu.edu; Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:00:57 -0600 (MDT) Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by listmail.cc.uga.edu (LSMTP for Windows NT v1.1a) with SMTP id 0.D64F5440[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]listmail.cc.uga.edu ; Tue, 01 Jul 1997 00:00:51 -0400 Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA) by UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (LMail V1.2c/1.8c) with BSMTP id 2409; Tue, 01 Jul 1997 00:00:13 -0400 Date: Tue, 01 Jul 1997 00:00:12 -0400 From: Automatic digest processor LISTSERV[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Subject: ADS-L Digest - 29 Jun 1997 to 30 Jun 1997 Sender: American Dialect Society ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA.CC.UGA.EDU To: Recipients of ADS-L digests ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Reply-to: American Dialect Society ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Message-id: 01IKP6DP5WSI0031DT[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]yvax.byu.edu X-Mozilla-Status: 2001 There are 12 messages totalling 399 lines in this issue. Topics of the day: 1. Drop the Big One [was: Re: MIKE TYSON SPECIAL: Bite ] (2) 2. Wazoo galore 3. galore 4. Agita (3) 5. Ozark Folk, the Clean Air Act, and Pollution Credits (4) 6. Ozark Folk etc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 29 Jun 1997 22:02:44 -0700 From: David Harnick-Shapiro david[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]BANZAI.ICS.UCI.EDU Subject: Drop the Big One [was: Re: MIKE TYSON SPECIAL: Bite ] On Sun, 29 Jun 1997 03:01, "Barry A. Popik" writes: RHHDAS has "bite the big one" from 1977, although I remember it a bit earlier. This refers to fellatio as the "big one." There is a nice RHHDAS entry on "big one," but it surprisingly omits the famous song by Tom Lehrer--"Let's drop the big one now! Let's drop the big one now!"--that antedates its "atomic destruction" entries. I think you're mixing two songs. (This is all from memory, so pray pardon any minor errors.) Tom Lehrer's WW III fight song (I'm guessing 1964, from his work with the short-lived TV program "That Was the Week That Was") goes Little Johnny Jones was a US pilot And no shrinking violet Was he ... And this is what he said on His way to Armageddon: "So long, Mom, we're off to drop the Bomb So don't wait up for me ... Randy Newman has a song about how America wants to be everybody's friend, but They don't like us anyhow So let's drop the Big One now ... BOOM goes London, and BOOM Paree More room for you, and more room for me... This was probably late 1970s (too late to push back any "atomic destruction" entry dates?). -------- David Harnick-Shapiro david[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ics.uci.edu Information and Computer Science University of California, Irvine ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 10:48:13 -0400 From: "J. Chambers" chambers[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CHASS.UTORONTO.CA Subject: Wazoo galore I learned "wazoo" in a schoolyard rhyme-- Howz yer father, howz yer mother, Howz yer Auntie Sue? Howz yer sister, howz yer brother, Howz yer Old Wazoo? This was probably in vogue around the time we learned that one where you uncover your upper arm and say, "Did ya see where the snake bit me?" Interest in wazoos was pretty keen. Jack ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 16:05:33 -0500 From: wachal robert s rwachal[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]BLUE.WEEG.UIOWA.EDU Subject: galore 'galore' gets a separate grammatical classification in the OED. Related but not quantifying expressions are 'things archaic' and 'Iowa City proper' Of course there are the historical things we all cite to our classes: 'notary public' and 'attorney general' Also 'professor emeritus' Bob Wachal ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 19:41:24 -0400 From: Evan Morris words1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]WORD-DETECTIVE.COM Subject: Agita For a newspaper column, I am trying to trace the word "agita" in English. It is absent from most dictionaries, both standard and slang, and Anne Soukhanov, in her "Word Watch," notes 1982 as an "early" citation, which seems awfully late to me. Does anyone have anything earlier, or a sense of how the Italian "agitato" became "agita"? Thanks, Evan -- Evan Morris words1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]well.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 20:11:55 -0400 From: Gregory {Greg} Downing downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IS2.NYU.EDU Subject: Re: Agita At 07:41 PM 6/30/97 -0400, you wrote: For a newspaper column, I am trying to trace the word "agita" in English. It is absent from most dictionaries, both standard and slang, and Anne Soukhanov, in her "Word Watch," notes 1982 as an "early" citation, which seems awfully late to me. Does anyone have anything earlier, or a sense of how the Italian "agitato" became "agita"? Thanks, Evan Morris words1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]well.com I don't have a dictionary to hand on this, and could well be wrong, but whatever its spelling my sense is that the word (usually encountered in speech not writing??) is actually Italian "acido" (acid in the stomach, worry, annoyance, anxiety), as originally pronounced by English speakers of Italian background. It was in general use when I arrived here in NYCity in 1979, and may well go back to the early 20C among Italian speakers, though I don't know how long it's been out there in the larger culture. That it is generally known here is perhaps supported by the fact that the two or three times I have used the word in class (as early as 1987) it has never failed to raised at least a bit of a laugh. I have also heard radio talk-show hosts use it since around the mid80s, though I was not paying attention to that medium before then. Greg Downing/NYU greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 20:42:34 -0400 From: Gregory {Greg} Downing downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IS2.NYU.EDU Subject: Re: Agita Forgot to mention, for those who might not know -- Italian acido is pronounced ah-chee-doh, accent on the first syllable. Italian immigrants to NYC, being largely from southern Italy, used regional Italian pronunciations that were also soon altered by the influence of English when only an occasional Italian word was being used. The first intervocalic consonant would be voiced not voiceless (thus becoming something that would be written "g" in English), the middle vowel was anglicized into the English i in "bit," and the final vowel became a schwa. So Italian "ah-chee-doh" became Italian-American, with a pronunication something like "ah-jih-duh" (hence the spelling "agita" given in the query). That's how my wife's grandmother pronounced it, and both her parents were native speakers of Italian who'd married near Benevento and lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (Oliver Street, later Catherine Street) in the first quarter of the 20th century. I imagine the idea of being agitated was involved in the semantic and phonetic development of acido into "agita" (or whatever the "proper" spelling of it is), as the sound and sense of acido ( = worry/annoyance) and agita(tion) interacted. Greg Downing/NYU greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:16:05 -0400 From: TERRY IRONS t.irons[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MOREHEAD-ST.EDU Subject: Ozark Folk, the Clean Air Act, and Pollution Credits There is a dialect vocabulary question here, but some people might properly intrepret this post as an excuse for some kind of greenpeace political diatribe. But it is nicely framed in a narrative context, which I hope you will enjoy, and I would also really like an answer to the dialect question at the end of the post. Of course, I would also like all of you to think about the environmental issue, even though it is not really what ADS-L is about. Earlier today, a colleague and friend of mine was talking to me about his backyard, from which he has removed the suburban pool concept of the former residents and which has turned into a mudhole, because we have had a really wet spring here in Kentucky, which continues into summer (this fact has played havoc with our tobacco growers, but that is another issue the nation seems to be dealing with in a rather inept fashion). He has decided to keep the mudhole as a pond concept, because it is fed by a spring. The pond is becoming the home to tadpoles and various insect larva, some of which are extremely rare in occurrence (you might say they should be on the endangered species list, but we dont worry too much about bugs). He has tested the water, which includes run-off in addition to the spring water and has determined that it is pure, entirely free from pollutants. This accounts for the presence of these insect larva, which will not survive in water containing any pollutants. (I said they were rare.) This fact is not surprising in our region, even though the same could not be said for many other areas of the US. Further, the area in which we live, eastern Kentucky, already meets the current clean air act standards regarding ozone and particulate matter. In addition, this region already exceeds the recently announced controversial more stringent standards. Unfortunately, this means that companies that pollute can relocate to our region, because the pollution they emit does not increase the level of pollution in our region above the threshholds of the current and probably even the new national standards. We have seen such an incident, in which a Guardian Motor Plant, which produces plastic car parts, located in our region. The plant, which will be completed sometime in 1998, will pump several tons of heavy metal into the atmosphere as a polluting by-product of their operation. They could not locate this plant in any other region region of the US without more stringent pollution controls. But they could locate here because our air is clear. Because the shit they spew into the air we breath wont raise this area above the clean air threshholds. Of course, if they did, they could always buy pollution credits from some other area, as the White House and EPA officials recently informed us, concerning the implementation of these new standards. Before I get back to the dialect question, allow me to finish my greenpeace comment. The implementation of the clean air act is essentially flawed because it defines clean air in terms of a regional aggregate and not in terms of individual action. If we are concerned as a people about clean air, we should place limits upon what the individual (corporation) may do, rather than allowing some business to pollute to its hearts delight because it neighbors are "clean." The revised regulations are flawed because they place the burden upon governing bodies in various regions to bring the region into compliance rather than targeting the offending polluters directly. End of diatribe. So anyway, my friend observed that this water he tested was pure but it also had traces of petroleum. So we started singing the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillys. "Here's a story about a man named Jed, poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed. One day he was shooting at some food and up through the ground came a bubbling crude,..." Wondering whether my friend was going to get rich and move to Beverlee, and having nothing else to do, I wondered whether it was really appropriate to call the Clampett's "hillbillys." We got to jawin about "hillbilly" being a word to refer to people from the Appalachian area. My friend Robert said that the culture portrayed in the TV show was truly the culture of the Appalachian folk, but he went on to point out that the Clampett's were from Arkansas, the home of our. . . . So we got to thinking there is a word to refer to rural folk from the Ozarks, in contrast with rural folk from where we live. We concluded that the term wasnt "Okie" because that referred to people from Oklahoma. Something in our experience made us think there was a term to refer to people from the Ozarks, but we couldn't remember what it was. I told him I couldnt solve our clean air problem, but that some folks I know could probably tell us what the word we were thinking of is. So here's the promised dialect question. What is the (regional) term to refer to someone from the Ozarks? Ideas on the other problem are welcomed. Virtually, Terry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:34:36 -0400 From: Gregory {Greg} Downing downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IS2.NYU.EDU Subject: Re: Ozark Folk etc. At 10:16 PM 6/30/97 -0400, you wrote: There is a dialect vocabulary question here.... I would... really like an answer to the dialect question at the end of the post. I don't have an offhand answer to your specific question, but it reminds me (especially in light of the dialect discussions on this list in mid-June when I was away) that the 1997 edition of _Dictionaries_ is just now out, with a Forum on "Dialect Labeling in Dictionaries," seven pieces running from pp. 94-189, some by folks who post to this list, and four by people with DARE affiliations. Greg Downing/NYU greg.downing[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nyu.edu or downingg[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]is2.nyu.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:26:22 -0400 From: "Bethany K. Dumas" dumasb[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UTK.EDU Subject: Re: Ozark Folk, the Clean Air Act, and Pollution Credits 1. You wrote: "from which he has removed the suburban pool concept of the former residents" -- did he remove the concept or a pool??? 2. The hillbillies in the Arkansas Ozarks call themselves hillbillies, in my experience. I have a number of taped interviews in which I ask that question and get that response. The interviews are from the 1970s. However, remember that "Okie" is sort of half a word. The joke I heard in northern California when I spent the summer after my first year of graduate school as a "fruit tramp" (their term) was that if you walked into any packing house in n. Ca and yelled, "Hey, Arkie, Okie, and Tex, get over here," everybody in the place would come running. Then there's also peckerwood ... Bethany, who was a grad. student at UA off and on 1961-71 Bethany K. Dumas, J.D., Ph.D. Applied Linguistics, Language & Law Department of English EMAIL: dumasb[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]utk.edu 415 McClung Tower (423) 974-6965, (423) 974-6926 (FAX) University of Tennessee Editor, Language in the Judicial Process: Knoxville, TN 37996-0430 USA http://ljp.la.utk.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:51:07 -0400 From: TERRY IRONS t.irons[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MOREHEAD-ST.EDU Subject: Re: Ozark Folk, the Clean Air Act, and Pollution Credits On Mon, 30 Jun 1997, Bethany K. Dumas wrote: 1. You wrote: "from which he has removed the suburban pool concept of the former residents" -- did he remove the concept or a pool??? Well, you'd have to know this guy. I can't figure out whether he's a (new) ultra-orthodox hassidic jew or an orthodox jew or a tibetan buddhist. It's about the question of whether we have a soul that survives death. SO maybe it was the pool he removed or the concept. The pool is still there but the concept of what it was/is has changed??? 2. The hillbillies in the Arkansas Ozarks call themselves hillbillies, in my experience. I have a number of taped interviews in which I ask that question and get that response. The interviews are from the 1970s. But we (this inchoate ultra-orthodox-bardo-thodal-zen-jew and I, as if there is a difference between us) also have an intuition that there is another term for self and/or other reference to people from the Ozarks, in contrast to people from the Appalachians. Is there such a self or other reference term, or is our intuition wrong? Virtually, Terry (*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*) Terry Lynn Irons t.irons[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]morehead-st.edu Voice Mail: (606) 783-5164 Snail Mail: UPO 604 Morehead, KY 40351 (*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*)=(*) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 23:06:25 -0400 From: "Barry A. Popik" Bapopik[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]AOL.COM Subject: Re: Drop the Big One [was: Re: MIKE TYSON SPECIAL: Bite ] He's right. I realized after I'd written it that I had confused Tom Lehrer's comic song with Randy Newman's comic song. I hadn't heard both in quite a while. Was there a "big one" in Lehrer's "We will all go together when we go...all at once and with an incandescent glow"? ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 22:58:12 -0400 From: "Bethany K. Dumas" dumasb[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UTK.EDU Subject: Re: Ozark Folk, the Clean Air Act, and Pollution Credits On Mon, 30 Jun 1997, TERRY IRONS continued the query: But we (this inchoate ultra-orthodox-bardo-thodal-zen-jew and I, as if there is a difference between us) also have an intuition that there is another term for self and/or other reference to people from the Ozarks, in contrast to people from the Appalachians. Is there such a self or other reference term, or is our intuition wrong? I've told you all I know -- if they are hillbillies, they call themselve hillbillies (but see earlier note). Please let me know what you learn. Thanks, Bethany Bethany K. Dumas, J.D., Ph.D. Applied Linguistics, Language & Law Department of English EMAIL: dumasb[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]utk.edu 415 McClung Tower (423) 974-6965, (423) 974-6926 (FAX) University of Tennessee Editor, Language in the Judicial Process: Knoxville, TN 37996-0430 USA http://ljp.la.utk.edu ------------------------------ End of ADS-L Digest - 29 Jun 1997 to 30 Jun 1997 ************************************************