Date:  Tue, 11 Mar 1997 14:07:00 -0700
From:  "Enrique Figueroa E." <efiguero[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CAPOMO.USON.MX>
Subject: Re: recently attested items

I'd take a guess not only at "-mente" and "-mundo", but also at "-bundo"
("tremebundo", etc.)... M. E.

On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Larry Horn wrote:

> 1) on register, context, and l-lessness: On the ABC World News Tonight
> Friday, Vice President Gore--a Tennessean, of course--was doing one of those
> tours-to-see-how-devastating-the-devastation-was along the flooded Ohio
> between Kentucky and Ohio. He promised that "we"--the Federal
> government--"will hep you". I was struck by the l-->0/__p as used by Al Gore;
> somehow it seems unlikely that he would have been ready to offer to "hep" the
> Bosnians restore peace to their land, or to "hep" schoolchildren gain better
> access to the information highway. I think it's also relevant that he was
> wearing jeans and a sport shirt for the flood tour, while the "hep"-less
> contexts would be ones in which he'd be wearing a suit and tie.
>
> 2) on mock- or faux-Spanish (no problemo, etc.): another formation I've
> come across recently is the superlative-forming -mondo, e.g. the use of
> both "correctamundo" and "perfectamundo" in a currently-airing radio
> commercial for RCA. I tried tracking them down via Nexis, and traced the
> former back to 1989, where the first (of 19) citations included a reference to
> the popularizing of the term by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Evidently,
> though, "correctamundo" has outlived Raffy, Leo, Mike and Don.
> "Perfectamundo", on the other hand, had just two cites, the earlier in 1992.
> Did this suffix derive from a perverse blend of -mente and mundo? Best not to
> know, perhaps.
>
> 3) some evidence that positive "anymore" is indeed spreading outside of its
> original area, even among non-linguists: The speaker is a sportscaster on
> local New York all-sports radio WFAN, Joe Benigno. Joe is, like me, a native
> Noo Yawka, and wears it proudly, r-lessness and all. He's actually a guy who
> used to call in so regularly that he was given his own show to host, albeit
> one that starts at 1:00 a.m. or so. So anyway here he is complaining about
> how inconsistently the home town basketball team, the New York Knicks, have
> been playing, just following the post-game show after "another agita special".
> What he says is "The Knicks are a different team from quarter to quarter
> anymore". Only, given the regional loyalty, they're "a different team from
> kwawta tuh kwawta anymaw". (Sorry for the transcription; ascii doth make
> dialect novelists of us all.) Somehow the combination of the indigenous
> vocalic clusters and the very much non-indigenous use of "anymore" struck me as
> particularly incongruous.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> --Larry
>