Date:    Mon, 9 Mar 1998 14:38:41 -0500
<br>From:    Larry Horn  laurence.horn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALE.EDU 
<br>Subject: Re[2]: Spittin' Image
<br>
<br>At 11:35 AM -0600 3/9/98, Ellen Johnson wrote:
<br>      Nevertheless, instances of "spirit and image" do indeed occur, for
<br>      example in the LAMSAS records, though I don't have the data available
<br>      here to comment on a racial distribution.  (I did have an elderly
<br>      white woman tell me that "X is the spit of Y" was heard from AfAms.)
<br>      Is this a further reinterpretation of spitten image (possibly
<br>      euphemistic) or a separate development?
<br> 
<br>      What dates do you have, Larry of the collocations
<br>      spitten image
<br>      spitting image
<br>      spit and image
<br>      in the United States?
<br> 
<br>      Ellen
<br>      ellen.johnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]wku.edu
<br>
<br>Well, I don't have an historical dictionary of specifically American usage
<br>on me and don't have earliest citations, but Wright's English Dialect
<br>Dictionary makes it clear that verbal and nominal 'spit', along with such
<br>collocations as 'as if one was spit out of a person's mouth' or 'as if one
<br>had spit it'--'used to describe a startling resemblance or likeness'--have
<br>been kicking around in Scotland, Ireland, England, and the U.S. since at
<br>least the early 19th c. (I'm not sure if Wright, like the OED, seeks to
<br>attest first citations.)  Wright also lists 'spitten' as a dialectal
<br>participle in Yorkshire and Cumberland, specifically in 'spitten image',
<br>although he also lists 'spit and image' separately; his citations neither
<br>confirm nor disconfirm my hypothesis that 'spitten image' came first.  Of
<br>course, my account would claim Wright's 'spit and image' was first 'spit
<br>'n' image' (from earlier spitten image), the anD coming in only after
<br>reanalysis--and sure enough, his first four citations of the "conjunction"
<br>do indeed have it as 'the (very/varry) spit an' image'.  Although these
<br>citations are all from the British Isles (Northumberland, West Yorkshire,
<br>Lancashire), it seems implausible to me that a specifically AAVE innovation
<br>(spirit and image --  spit an(d) image) just happened to replicate the
<br>pre-existing noun and verb 'spit' cited above and then migrate across the
<br>Atlantic from the pre-Civil War south to rural English speech.  The
<br>alternative chronology, i.e. that 'spit an' image' originated
<br>simultaneously by chance in Britain and southern U.S. speech, from entirely
<br>different sources (spirit and image, spitten image) but yielding exactly
<br>the same meaning, is hard to refute but to me both implausible and
<br>inelegant.  So my answer to Ellen's query above would be that 'spirit and
<br>image' is indeed another reinterpretation/ reanalysis/folk etymology of
<br>'spitVn image' rather than an entirely separate development.
<br>
<br>Larry
<br>