Date:     Mon, 1 Nov 1993 15:07:11 -0800

From: "Thomas L. Clark"  tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]NEVADA.EDU 

Subject:   Death of Clarence L. Barnhart reported



I just spoke with David Barnahrt on the telephone. His father died

October 24, 1993. The obituary appeared in the _New York Times_

on October 26, 1993. Mr. Barnhart was born in 1900.

-------------------------------------------------------

Thomas L. Clark English Department UNLV 89154

tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nevada.edu



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 00:15:38 -0500

From: "Gregory J. Pulliam"  HUMPULLIAM[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MINNA.ACC.IIT.EDU 

Subject:   longhandles



The cold weather is here in Chicago, and my thoughts have turned to long

underwear, which, in my youth in NE Mississippi (Aberdeen) I learned to refer

to as "long-handles." I learned the term from friends who were white, lower

socio-economic class. Being a still-poor ABD Asst. Prof, I am not yet able

to afford DARE--so I haven't even been able to look the term up there. Is

there a citation for it, and just as important, has anyone else out there ever

heard this item? Thanks in advance for all responses.

Greg Pulliam

IIT



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 05:47:35 -0600

From: Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: longhandles



  The cold weather is here in Chicago, and my thoughts have turned to long

  underwear, which, in my youth in NE Mississippi (Aberdeen) I learned to refer

  to as "long-handles." I learned the term from friends who were white, lower

  socio-economic class. Being a still-poor ABD Asst. Prof, I am not yet able

  to afford DARE--so I haven't even been able to look the term up there. Is

  there a citation for it, and just as important, has anyone else out there ever

  heard this item? Thanks in advance for all responses.



I've heard it, although I don't think I've ever known anybody who actually

wore them. I've heard the term used in sort of a joking tone, like "Better

get out your long-handles -- it's gonna be cold today." The term is used

interchangeably with "long-johns."



I also am from Mississippi -- native of Jackson, resident of Starkville

for the past 20+ years.

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 08:56:00 EST

From: "James_C.Stalker"  STALKER[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.EDU 

Subject:   longhandles



I grew up in a suburb of Louisville, KY, mostly working and lower middle

class.We used the term in my family, although we did not wear the garment.

The term "longjohns" (always in the plural) was generally considered rural,

"countrified," and, of course, we city-bred folk were too sophisticated to

wear such articles of clothing.



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 08:58:00 EST

From: "James_C.Stalker"  STALKER[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.EDU 

Subject:   longhandles



I signed off a little too quickly. The "longjohns" comment from the

ex-Louisville resident is from

Jim Stalker

Department of English

Michigan State University

stalker[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]msu.edu



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 08:20:00 CDT

From: Beth Lee Simon  BLSIMON[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MACC.WISC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: longhandles



ABD's, and others on a campus, may find volumes 1 & 2 of DARE in the

library.



beth simon

DARE



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 08:37:00 CDT

From: Luanne von Schneidemesser  LUANNEVONS[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MACC.WISC.EDU 

Subject:   long-handles



Does DARE have long handles? Yes, and all kinds of

variants, as the list below shows:



GOURD HANDLES

HANDLEBARS

HANDLES

LONG HANDLE

LONG HANDLE DRAWERS

LONG HANDLE JOHNS

LONG HANDLE UNDERWEAR

LONG HANDLEBARS

LONG HANDLED UNDERWEAR

LONG HANDLEDS

LONG HANDLES

LONG-HANDLED DRAWERS

LONG-HANDLED UNDERWEAR

RED HANDLES

SHORT HANDLES



And yes, it is regional. Natalie and Jim are right. While

the North and North Midland may be unfamiliar with the term,

it is common in the rest of the country. We have 247 responses

with long handles or a form of it; add short handles, handlebars,

etc., and there are 261 responses.



And very soon we'll need them here in Wisconsin.



                Luanne



Luanne von Schneidemesser

Dictionary of American Regional English

6129 H.C. White, UW-Madison, 53706

(608)263-2748



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 09:40:25 EST

From: Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject:   Salugi?



Impatient for the relevant volume of DARE to appear, I was wondering if anyone

out there in ADS-Land can help me pin down the distribution and, if possible,

history of this term, used regularly for a game (or teasing-event) popular in

New York City--or at least one part of the city--during the 1950's. The

phonetic representation can be given as something like [s[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]LU:ji], where [AT SYMBOL GOES HERE] is a

schwa and j is the usual voiced palatal affricate. I've never seen the word

in print, but always assumed it was Italian in origin, hence the spelling on

the subject line.  I'll post my own gloss after I get some responses.

                   Larry Horn

P.S. Of course, I wanted data or intuitions about the meaning as well--how

is/was salugi played?



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 10:01:00 CST

From: salikoko mufwene  mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU 

Subject:   Re: longhandles



 James_C.Stalker:

 I grew up in a suburb of Louisville, KY, mostly working and lower middle

 class.We used the term in my family, although we did not wear the garment.

 The term "longjohns" (always in the plural) was generally considered rural,

 "countrified," and, of course, we city-bred folk were too sophisticated to

 wear such articles of clothing.



 The term I was taught in Chicago, when several years ago I was advised how

to dress for the cold weather was "long Johns."

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Linguistics, U. of Chicago

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 12:30:45 EST

From: Robert Kelly  kelly[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]LEVY.BARD.EDU 

Subject:   Re: long-handles



Some of us new to the postings ---and libraries in general--- could bear to

hear news about the current status of DARE and publication plans for future

volumes of this most valuable of all projects.



And are there any chances of CD-ROM versions of the published text, or all

the text? Or on-line access?



The Internet makes dreamers of us all...



R.Kelly



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 12:40:42 EST

From: Robert Kelly  kelly[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]LEVY.BARD.EDU 

Subject:   Re: Salugi?



I learned the term watching it played, maybe even being a victim of it. I gew

_digo_ grew up in Brooklyn, but learned the "game" in Manhattan and the Bronx.

It is that fine old vicious childhood game of stealing a kid's hat and tossing

it from hand to hand over the kid's head or around the kid's back, hand to

hand in a circle of tormentors. Usually the kid is fat or short or weak or

wrong sex or wrong color--in any case, it is certainly a Persecution Model game,

but it was only played with the hat or cap or scarf--never with book or bag or

object. I learned the word, then, in Northern New York City in the 1950s, and

have heard it nowhere else. When I use it nowadays (expressive as it is), I

get blank stares, even from people whose local origin suggests they know the

game. I'd love to know if the word is still used down there --- and even

whether the symbolic-torture has given way to real ones, of whether it's

still possible to vex in so symbolic a fashion.



Sometimes the game was introduced by an older child, or stronger child, saying

Hey, let's play salugi [I've never seen the word spelled out, and accept the

spelling at hand]! or even, more craftily, Wanna play salugi? This last

was esteemed especial fun, since the victim is complicit with his own fate.

There was the hint that salugi was rare and fine and special---perhaps the

word itself is one of those brilliant coinages, at the nonce rich with

connotation and void of denotation.



I await more news.



R.Kelly



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 10:07:59 -0800

From: Janice Kammert  jkammert[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]U.WASHINGTON.EDU 

Subject:   Re: longhandles



I grew up in an upper class suburb of Chicago in the 1960s-70s. We used the

term "longjohns." I even remember wearing them.



On Tue, 2 Nov 1993, James_C.Stalker wrote:



  I grew up in a suburb of Louisville, KY, mostly working and lower middle

  class.We used the term in my family, although we did not wear the garment.

  The term "longjohns" (always in the plural) was generally considered rural,

  "countrified," and, of course, we city-bred folk were too sophisticated to

 



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 13:57:47 EST

From: Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: Salugi?



That's exactly it. I don't think your citing will widen the isogloss, but

whereabouts were you (more or less specifically) at the time? I was on West

163 St., Manhattan. I've always explained to friends outside the relevant

dialect area that salugi differs from keepaway precisely in that one couldn't

have proposed "Let's play salugi--I'll be it!" (Unless one was a masochist,

perhaps?) So you clearly have the same understanding of the form. Let's see

who else signs on.

                 Larry



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 14:02:53 EST

From: Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject:   Anyone (else) for salugi?



Sorry, everyone. I hadn't noticed that the posting from R. Kelly went out to

the list rather than just to me--thus the reply I just posted to everyone. So

the secret is out. My familiarity with the term and the concept are the same

as that of the other poster. But please don't let that stop anyone else from

responding, whether or not your memories are the same. Is there any evidence

about when the term (or the "game") originated, whether it's still extant, or

(if not) when it died out? If the neighborhood in which I learned salugi

still plays it, they do so in Spanish, but perhaps it's around elsewhere.

Any DARE data?

                        Larry



Date:     Tue, 2 Nov 1993 16:31:56 -0500

From: james a tucker  jatuck00[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIK.UKY.EDU 

Subject:   Re: longhandles



I was raised on a farm in Lincoln County, Kentucky (in the

south-central part of the state) and often wore long

underwear while working outside during the winter. My

parents and grandparents always called them

long-handles (occasionally, long-johns). Hope this

helps.



---

--

-=+    James A. Tucker   jatuck00[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]mik.uky.edu    +=-

-=+Classics/Economics Undergraduate University of Kentucky+=-

-=+    "Vex not thy spirit at the course of things;   +=-

-=+       They heed not thy vexation."       +=-

-=+     --Marcus Aurelius, quoting Euripides     +=-



Date:     Wed, 3 Nov 1993 02:23:08 CST

From: Donald Lance  ENGDL%MIZZOU1.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: longhandles



Is there another term for longhandles? That's what they are. Just like

snake doctors and tow sacks. Others have funny terms for lotsa things.

DARE goes only thru H, sop we'll have to wait till next year for 'longjohns'.



I eagerly await the next installment.

It has been cold here too, with snow flurries, but not like Chi Town, I'm

sure.        DMLance



Date:     Wed, 3 Nov 1993 08:33:59 EST

From: Robert Kelly  kelly[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]LEVY.BARD.EDU 

Subject:   Re: Salugi?



Isogloss barely quivers: I first played salugi on West 155th street. Though

that was in a CCNY context, hence a false sense of the local. But interesting

that the instances were only eight blocks apart. Are we onto a Vinegar Hill

microlect?



RK



Date:     Wed, 3 Nov 1993 09:51:49 -0600

From: Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject:   Salugi



I asked an e-mail friend who grew up in the Bronx in the '50s if he

had ever heard of Salugi. Here's his reply (forwarded with his

permission):



  Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1993 23:03:12 -0600 (CST)

  From: "Ken Wolman"  woldoc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]woldoc.jvnc.net 

  Subject: RE: Salugi

 

  SLOODJIE! Oh my God, I haven't thought of that in years! It's like Hot

  Potato. Poor sucker in the middle tries to get the ball, or his hat back,

  or something....



  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 12:14:15 +22305606

From: "Ellen Johnson Faq. Filosofia y Hdes."        ejohnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ABELLO.SECI.UCHILE.CL 

Subject:   longjohns



My father, a native Atlantan born in the 1920s, uses the term long-handled

underwear. It always has a slightly humorous connotation, as noted by Natalie.

Is this because such an artifact is so infrequently used in Georgia as to seem

somewhat ludicrous in itself? It's interesting to hear that others use the

term, since I just assumed it was another of the idiosyncrasies of my dad's

speech, like bumbershoot for umbrella.



Ellen Johnson ejohnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]abello.seci.uchile.cl



P.S. Thanks for the replies on variation and TESOL. The conference paper went

over well and it gave me an opportunity to learn some new things and relearn

some old ones, since I trained and worked as a foreign language teacher several

years ago. I'm currently reading Sociolinguistics and Second Lg. Acquisition

by Dennis Preston and recommend it for anyone interested in the topic.



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 08:16:00 CDT

From: Joan Houston Hall  DARE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MACC.WISC.EDU 

Subject:   salugi



DARE has several anecdotal quotes for -salugi-, all from NYC, from the

1950's-70's. The term has also made it into print, in Fred Ferretti's

book -The Great American Book of Sidewalk, Stoop, Dirt, Curb, and Alley

Games- (Workman Publishing Co., NY, 1975). Ferretti says: "-Saluggi,

or Saloogie-, is another rather simple game that derives from torment. Two or

 more players simply take something..from another kid

dashing up and down the sidewalk while the owner tries desperately to get

back his or her property. The only rules are that whoever catches the item

must shout, "Saloogie on Chris's knife!," or "Saloogie on Stevie's model

 plane!,"

or whatever and that the victim must be angry, which is not at all difficult.

It is not necessary to choose up for a game of Saloogie; rather, the predators

have to decide on a victim, which is also not difficult." Ferretti's domain is

 Queens.

Joan Hall, DARE



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 08:45:00 CDT

From: Joan Houston Hall  DARE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MACC.WISC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: longhandles



The DARE data show some interesting contrasts for the long underwear terms.

There's a great map for -long handles-, showing a clear South, South Midland,

West distribution. The term -longies- fills in nicely in the North and

North Midland. -Long jeans- is found especially in the Central Atlantic and

New York. As for -long johns-, it's very widespread, but somewhat less

frequent in the South and South Midland. And -long drawers- is found

chiefly in the Atlantic states.

Joan Hall, DARE



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 08:18:57 -0800

From: Scott Schwenter  schwen[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CSLI.STANFORD.EDU 

Subject:   Re: salugi



 

  DARE has several anecdotal quotes for -salugi-, all from NYC, from the

  1950's-70's. The term has also made it into print, in Fred Ferretti's

  book -The Great American Book of Sidewalk, Stoop, Dirt, Curb, and Alley

  Games- (Workman Publishing Co., NY, 1975). Ferretti says: "-Saluggi,

  or Saloogie-, is another rather simple game that derives from torment. Two or

  more players simply take something..from another kid

  dashing up and down the sidewalk while the owner tries desperately to get

  back his or her property. The only rules are that whoever catches the item

  must shout, "Saloogie on Chris's knife!," or "Saloogie on Stevie's model

  plane!,"

  or whatever and that the victim must be angry, which is not at all difficult.

  It is not necessary to choose up for a game of Saloogie; rather, the predators

  have to decide on a victim, which is also not difficult." Ferretti's domain i

s

  Queens.

  Joan Hall, DARE

 

Is this game the same as "monkey in the middle"?



Scott Schwenter

Linguistics

Stanford Univ.



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 11:16:41 -0600

From: Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: longjohns



  term, since I just assumed it was another of the idiosyncrasies of my dad's

  speech, like bumbershoot for umbrella.



I also know "bumbershoot."

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 13:27:35 EST

From: Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: salugi



In connection with Scott Schwenter's query on the relation of salugi to

monkey-in-the-middle: as I mentioned earlier, and brought out in various

other posts, salugi is/was a rather malicious "game" (game in the sense that

giving someone noogies or a pink belly is a game) that MUST have a victim, one

who is not a willing player. At least for me, m-in-the-m has no such

constraints (both for me as a child, and now for my own children, there's

nothing inappropriate or masochistic about the suggestion "Let's play

monkey-in-the-middle; I'll be it." The suggestion "Let's play salugi on me"

has the flavor of "Why don't you tease me until I cry?" This was New York,

remember.              LH



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 12:45:27 -0600

From: Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: salugi



Funny timing. I forwarded some of the recent list discussion to my

friend who grew up in the Bronx and just got the following reply from

him (before I had even seen today's mention of Monkey-in-the-Middle):



  Sounds like saloogie/sloogie all right!

 

  Did I tell you it's also known as Monkey In The Middle? That's one I

  heard from Ann, who did not grow up in NYC, but on waaaaay out Eastern

  Long Island. You might wanna pass that on the ADS-L people, too.



(Ann is his wife.)

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 15:38:08 -0800

From: Donald Livingston  deljr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]U.WASHINGTON.EDU 

Subject:   Re: bumbershoot



"Bumbershoot" is alive and well in Seattle where we have a yearly music

festival by that name. That brings about sentences that would probably

have been unthinkable to previous generations: "Hey, are you going to

Bumbershoot this weekend?" I leave it to the reader to discern why

Seattle would name such a major musical event "Bumbershoot".



On Thu, 4 Nov 1993, Natalie Maynor wrote:



    term, since I just assumed it was another of the idiosyncrasies of my dad's

    speech, like bumbershoot for umbrella.

 

  I also know "bumbershoot."

   --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



All the best, Don.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Don Livingston             (Graduate Student)

4500 Whitman Ave. North #2       Dept. Slav. Lang. & Lit., DP-32

Seattle, WA 98103            University of Washington

Phone/Fax (206) 634-1539        Seattle, WA 98195



Date:     Thu, 4 Nov 1993 19:55:39 -0800

From: Donald Livingston  deljr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]U.WASHINGTON.EDU 

Subject:   Proverb



Colleagues,



    Somewhere over the last year I encountered a proverb or

saying that expressed the following idea: When in John's house,

dont' rave about Jim's talents/possessions/activities lest John

feel that you are obliquely slighting him (John) by not saying the

same of him. Does anyone know a proverb to that effect? I think

it was an English language proverb, but could have been Slavic or

Semitic. Thanks for you consideration!



All the best, Don.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Don Livingston             (Graduate Student)

4500 Whitman Ave. North #2       Dept. Slav. Lang. & Lit., DP-32

Seattle, WA 98103            University of Washington

Phone/Fax (206) 634-1539        Seattle, WA 98195



Date:     Sun, 7 Nov 1993 19:35:54 CST

From: "Donald M. Lance"  ENGDL%MIZZOU1.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Canadian Fed Tax Refund



For all ADS members who will be in Toronto. I'm forwarding pertinent info

from Ed Lawson, Prog Chair for ANS.

----------------------------Original message----------------------------



             Refund for Visitors



 Visitors to Canada may claim a refund of the 7% GST (Goods &

 Services Tax) on leaving Canada. What you do is keep receipts

 for lodging and goods purchased. The total has to be over $100.

 You take the receipts to a desk in a duty free shop where an

 immediate cash refund in given (in Canadian dollars). The

 receipts are returned immediately. Meals do not count, nor does

 transportation.



 Note: this refund applies only to the federal tax, not to the

 Ontario provincial tax.



Ed Lawson Psych SUNY-Fredonia NY 14063 (LAWSON[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]FREDONIA)



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 15:45:47 RSA

From: "m. lynne murphy"  104LYN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]WITSVMA.WITS.AC.ZA 

Subject:   3 inches short



hello,



i've been told that the acceptability of sentence (1) below is regionally-

determined. i'd like to get a sense of where in the u.s. (or even outside

the u.s.) one can say the following:



(1) The tablecloth is three inches short. (meaning there are three inches

   of the table that the cloth fails to cover)



(2) The tablecloth is three inches short of the mark.



(3) The tablecloth is three inches too short. (universally accepted, right?)



If sentence (1) is ok with you, can you also say:



(4) The package is 7 ounces heavy (and thus can't be shipped via UPS).



(5) The baby's bottle is 10 degrees warm (so you'd better cool it off

   a bit before giving it to her).



Is there anyone for whom (4) and (5) could mean that the weight of the

package equals 7 ounces or the temperature of the baby's bottle equals

10 degrees?



I'd appreciate judgments on these things from anyone and everyone.

Please indicate what area you're from or what dialect you consider

yourself to speak. Replies can be posted to me privately if you like.



Thanks in advance,

Lynne Murphy

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

104lyn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]witsvma.wits.ac.za



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 16:02:58 RSA

From: "m. lynne murphy"  104LYN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]WITSVMA.WITS.AC.ZA 

Subject:   addendum to 3" short



ach, i forgot an important question in the last message.



Can everyone say (a) and (b)?



(a) I was 10 minutes early for class.

(b) I was 10 minutes late for class.



thanks again for your time.



lynne murphy



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 09:26:01 -0500

From: "J. Chambers"  chambers[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]EPAS.UTORONTO.CA 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



My inland urban middle-class Canadian English usage apparently matches

Lynne Murphy's. I can say

    The tablecloth is 3" short

meaning it is too short to cover the whole table--3" remain uncovered.

But I can't say

    The tablecloth is 3" long

meaning it is that much too long. I have to say it's 3" too long. And

I can't ordinarily say that the package is 7 oz heavy, meaning that

much too heavy for UPS, and I certainly can't say the baby bottle is

10 degrees warm, meaning that much too warm. This last sentence more

probably would be

    The baby bottle is 10 degrees hot

but it doesn't help. It still can't mean that it's that much too hot.



So "short" appears to be a curiosity. I wonder if it's because "short"

is the marked member whereas "long" is the unmarked one, in Eve

Clark's terms. If so, then it should be o.k. to say

    The doorstopper is thin

meaning it's too thin to hold the door open, the door slips right over

it, but no good to say

    The doorstopper is thick

meaning it's too big to wedge under the door.To me, they sound equally

unlikely.                --Jack Chambers



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 17:07:53 RSA

From: lynne murphy  104LYN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]WITSVMA.WITS.AC.ZA 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



thanks for your response to my query.



lynne murphy



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 10:25:14 CST

From: Dennis Baron  debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UIUC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



 (1) The tablecloth is three inches short. (meaning there are three inches

    of the table that the cloth fails to cover)



Yes.

 

 (2) The tablecloth is three inches short of the mark.

 

No, unless there is a mark on the table -- but that is highly

contextualized.

 (3) The tablecloth is three inches too short. (universally accepted, right?)

 

Yes.



 If sentence (1) is ok with you, can you also say:

 

 (4) The package is 7 ounces heavy (and thus can't be shipped via UPS).

No



 

 (5) The baby's bottle is 10 degrees warm (so you'd better cool it off

    a bit before giving it to her).



No.

 Is there anyone for whom (4) and (5) could mean that the weight of the

 package equals 7 ounces or the temperature of the baby's bottle equals

 10 degrees?



But I can say, "The baby has a temperature" (=fever) and my mother

-in-law can say, "Dennis has cholesterol" (= high cholesterol). She's

from Chicago. I'm from NY.

 



So, M. Lynne, what else is new?

Dennis

--

debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uiuc.edu          (\          217-333-2392

                  \'\       fax: 217-333-4321

Dennis Baron            \'\     ____________

Department of English        / '|    ()___________)

University of Illinois       \ '/    \ ~~~~~~~~~ \

608 South Wright St.         \      \ ~~~~~~~~~ \

Urbana, IL 61801           ==).     \ __________\

                   (__)      ()___________)



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 10:40:41 EST

From: Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



I'm also in the dialect group that gets 3 inches short (= 'too short for X')

but none of the other adjectives. Of course, '3 inches long' is pre-empted by

its ordinary measure-term use from meaning '...too long', but why don't we get

'3 inches narrow', '2 feet small', etc.? My colleague Caroline Heycock (who

is from Scotland, but shares the dialect feature) suggests a relationship to

expressions like 'I'm 5 cents short' (where again, X short = 'short by X

amount'), and we also get e.g. We're two {players/screws/knives/...} short.

In these cases, the 'too short for' paraphrase doesn't work, but 'short by'

does.

Notice too that I think everyone can get the 'too X' reading with adverbs like

'a bit', 'a little' modifying the measure adjective: a bit tall/short/green,

etc. all can be interprested as 'a bit TOO adj (for...)'. I'd assume this is

a general pragmatic process, though.

                Larry Horn



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 10:50:00 EST

From: Mark Ingram  MAINGR01[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UKCC.UKY.EDU 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



On Mon, 8 Nov 1993 15:45:47 RSA m. lynne murphy said:

 hello,

 

 i've been told that the acceptability of sentence (1) below is regionally-

 determined. i'd like to get a sense of where in the u.s. (or even outside

 the u.s.) one can say the following:

 

 (1) The tablecloth is three inches short. (meaning there are three inches

    of the table that the cloth fails to cover)



This sounds just fine. I understand completely and do not find it confusing.



 (2) The tablecloth is three inches short of the mark.



This is more precise.



 (3) The tablecloth is three inches too short. (universally accepted, right?)



This is also more precise.

 If sentence (1) is ok with you, can you also say:

 

 (4) The package is 7 ounces heavy (and thus can't be shipped via UPS).

 

 (5) The baby's bottle is 10 degrees warm (so you'd better cool it off

    a bit before giving it to her).

 

 Is there anyone for whom (4) and (5) could mean that the weight of the

 package equals 7 ounces or the temperature of the baby's bottle equals

 10 degrees?



#4 and #5 are confusing. Is the package 7 oz too heavy? I think I need to

hear the word TOO in there. Same with a bottle 10 degrees TOO hot.



 I'd appreciate judgments on these things from anyone and everyone.

 Please indicate what area you're from or what dialect you consider

 yourself to speak. Replies can be posted to me privately if you like.



I grew up in the rural area just outside Louisville, Ky. We moved into

the suburbs of Louisville in the late 50s. I attended Catholic schools there.

I speak a regional standard. Some Kentuckians think I don't come from around

here. People from other states sometimes fail to place the accent. That is

a relatively common response to the speech patterns of someone from the

East end of Louisville.



Mark Ingram

Lexington, Ky.



 Thanks in advance,

 Lynne Murphy

 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

 104lyn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]witsvma.wits.ac.za



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 10:37:44 -0600

From: Anita Henderson  HEND%UKANVAX.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: addendum to 3" short



Yes, I can say both"10 minutes early/late for class." (Phila.

area/middle-class).

A. Henderson Univ.of Kansas



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 13:13:00 CDT

From: Joan Houston Hall  DARE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MACC.WISC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: salugi



Monkey-in-the-middle can become the same as salugi, but it can also start as an

 officially sanctioned gym class game, with a circle

Joan Hall, DARE



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 14:22:35 EST

From: Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: salugi



I'm beginning to think (supported by postings like Joan Hall's and comments by

others outside the NYC dialect area) that there's a privative relation between

salug(g)i and monkey-in-the-middle/keepaway. Every instance of the former is

or can be an instance of the latter (modulo the actual speech act of

announcing "Salugi on your hat", etc.), but crucially not vice versa.

Salug(g)i can then be glossed essentially as monkey-in-the-middle with an

unwilling victim. (It's also crucial that the saluggied item be something

belonging to that victim.) For those reared in NYC during the relevant period

(the 1950's?), to come upon an innocent victimless game called

monkey-in-the-middle (or keepaway, which may or may not be the California

equivalent thereof[?]) leads to the inference that the teasing/torture variety

of the game doesn't fall within the scope of these labels, but the more

accurate conclusion is that NYC's salugi/monkey-in-the-middle distinction is

neutralized in the majority dialect, where the latter is simply unspecified

with respect to the [+/- unwilling victim] distinction.



                           Larry Horn



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 15:09:47 CST

From: Gerald Walton  VCGW%UMSVM.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



On Mon, 8 Nov 1993 15:45:47 RSA m. lynne murphy raised questions about

the acceptability of certain sentences:



 (1) The tablecloth is three inches short. (meaning there are three inches

    of the table that the cloth fails to cover)



Acceptable to me, though adding _too_ would be preferred.



 (2) The tablecloth is three inches short of the mark.



Acceptable.



 (3) The tablecloth is three inches too short. (universally accepted, right?)



Yes, I would think it universally acceptable.



 (4) The package is 7 ounces heavy (and thus can't be shipped via UPS).



Not acceptable.



 (5) The baby's bottle is 10 degrees warm (so you'd better cool it off

    a bit before giving it to her).



Not acceptable.



"Acceptable" as I have used it means something like "would not be

used by speakers from my part of the country--almost 60 years

in Mississippi. GWW



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 15:17:30 CST

From: Gerald Walton  VCGW%UMSVM.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: addendum to 3" short



On Mon, 8 Nov 1993 16:02:58 RSA m. lynne murphy said:

 Can everyone say (a) and (b)?

 (a) I was 10 minutes early for class.

 (b) I was 10 minutes late for class.



Yes from me. GWW



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 19:28:56 CST

From: "Donald M. Lance"  ENGDL%MIZZOU1.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



Lynn has already thanked those who responded to her query about a table

cloth being 3" short. Of the questions she asked, that's the only one that

seems to be dialectal and that I say ("short of the mark"not seeming dialectal

to me). My language comes from growing up in South Texas with many neighbors

from all parts of the country. But this expression was also common in the

speech of my parents, both born in Arkansas.



By the way, a table cloth that is 3" short might go over the edges of the

table (i.e., actually cover all of the top) but be shorter than it oughta be

by 3".

   DMLance



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 19:24:46 -0800

From: Donald Livingston  deljr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]U.WASHINGTON.EDU 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



I find myself having interesting reactions to the sentences Lynn posted.

Though I myself would only actually produce a few of those forms, I would

not at all be surprised to hear almost any of them from local speakers

where I grew up, though I would consider some of them careless

speech, that is, that the speaker was not choosing his/her words

particularly carefully. I grew up in Tucson, Arizona (WASP middle class

family). I consider myself to speak standard TV broadcaster English.



  (1) The tablecloth is three inches short. (meaning there are three inches

    of the table that the cloth fails to cover)



Sounds normal to me in careless speech. I would say it occasionally

(Sorry, Lynne, changed my mind on this one).



  (2) The tablecloth is three inches short of the mark.



Sounds grammatically normal to me, though somewhat high style. I would

rarely say it.



  (3) The tablecloth is three inches too short. (universally accepted, right?)



Absolutely normal.



  If sentence (1) is ok with you, can you also say:

 

  (4) The package is 7 ounces heavy (and thus can't be shipped via UPS).



Sounds normal to me in careless speech. I wouldn't at all be surprised

to hear it at the local post office. I would never say it.



  (5) The baby's bottle is 10 degrees warm (so you'd better cool it off

    a bit before giving it to her).



Sounds normal in careless speech. I would never say it, though.



  Is there anyone for whom (4) and (5) could mean that the weight of the

  package equals 7 ounces or the temperature of the baby's bottle equals

  10 degrees?



I would not at all be surprised to hear (4) and (5) with these meanings

in careless speech, but would never produce (4) with that meaning and

would only rarely produce (5) with that meaning.



Both (a) and (b) of the addendum are fine with my in all speech registers.



All the best, Don.



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 12:57:27 EST

From: Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: three inches



As I mentioned earlier, my British colleague Caroline Heycock (Glaswegian by

birth) shares the same judgment everyone else has on this, viz. that '3 inches

short' is impeccable, with the understanding 'short by 3 inches'. Indeed,

nobody has reported LACKING this form. So I checked the OED, and sure enough

under 18f of the adjectival listing for 'short' we have:



  Preceded by a sb. or an expression of quantity, indicating what is lacking

  of the required number or amount.



  (Citations include 'We are a lady short' [1893], 'two pounds short in his

  cash')



The point is that '3 inches short' is not a dialectal usage (in the sense that

only a specific geographically or socially definable group has it), and that

it's not a DISTINCT usage from that of 'X short', where X is ANY measure

expression whose semantics fits the context.

                        Larry Horn



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 13:08:04 EST

From: Robert Kelly  kelly[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]LEVY.BARD.EDU 

Subject:   Re: three inches



While I (New York born) find "...short" natural and normal, my wife (Boston

born and raised) understands it but would never perform it, choosing

rather "...too short." So there may be a wiggling isoglossette after all.



Robert Kelly



Date:     Mon, 8 Nov 1993 23:48:33 -0700

From: Rudy Troike  RTROIKE%ARIZVMS.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



I grew up 150 miles south of Don Lance, on the Mexican border in South Texas

and agree with most of the intuitions posted to date. The paraphrase "short

BY three inches/dollars" seems best to capture the sense.

        --Rudy Troike



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 10:18:53 RSA

From: lynne murphy  104LYN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]WITSVMA.WITS.AC.ZA 

Subject:   three inches



well, the response to my query re: three inches short is

very appreciated. however, so far it doesn't seem that there is

any regionality to the distribution of three inches short,

since everybody seems to think it's ok. am i wrong?



lynne murphy

university of the witwatersrand

104lyn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]witsvma.wits.ac.za



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 07:48:00 EST

From: "Dennis.Preston"  22709MGR%MSU.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



There are indeed some interesting things to be said about 'short.'

First, it is surely not a matter of marked and unmarked. Neither of the pairs

narrow-wide, old-young, and so on fit the pattern 'It was three inches (years)

X' in the sense intended.

Note, however, that 'short' appears to be the only one of these forms which

has a verbal counterpart ('He shorted me three dollars,' 'They shorted me

three pounds,' and so on).

Additionally, this 'short' is surely no ndifferent than a host of other items

which fit this construction: 'It was three inches off,' 'It was three enches

shy,' 'It was three inches over,' 'It was three inches under.' All these

express the intended 'not to the standard or expected' interpretation.

Shouldn't we be looking at this wider range of facts? It strikes me that all

too often when we do dialect work we focus too narrowly on items.

By the way, although I do not think it is particularly important to this

discussion, I am an old lower-middle/upper-working class white man from

southern Indiana (far north side of Louisville, KY).

Dennis Preston

 22709mgr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]msu.bitnet 



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 08:52:27 EST

From: Boyd Davis  FEN00BHD[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UNCCVM.UNCC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



Lynne, my dialect area - and my responses - match Dennis Preston's.



Dennis, wouldn't the notion of shortlisting fit here? I cannot think of

*longlisting



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 10:28:03 -0700

From: Rudy Troike  RTROIKE%ARIZVMS.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: three inches



I spoke to a visiting German prof from Dresden the other day, who could

hardly be strongly influenced by American English, and found that she had

the same interpretation of "three inches short".

    Do we have any British speakers to ask?

                --Rudy Troike



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 15:50:32 -0230

From: "Philip Hiscock, MUN Folklore & Language Archive" philiph[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]KEAN.UCS.MUN.CA 

Subject:   Place names with 'eye'; Maritime Troytowns



In researching the origin of three Newfoundland placenames, two now

called "Traytown" and one now called "Triton," a local historian

has come upon the same spelling "Troy Town" used for all three at

one time or another in their histories. He asked me for an opinion

and I ventured that their particularly convoluted waterways led

18th and 19th sailors to refer to each place as a "troy town"

(aka "troyton", hence modern "Triton"), meaning maze-like.

    I am familiar with the widespread use of "troytown" in

English and Scandinavian placenames for the sites of pre-historic

and medieval mazes cut into turf, etc. One such place was not far

from Poole, out of which port many Newfoundland settlers came.

But I do not know of any such placenames in North America, other than

these three in Newfoundland. Can anyone point me in the direction

of a Troytown (or a Troy) in North America that was not named simply

for classical allusion?

    One of these Traytowns is on a small island now called

"Ireland's Eye," the main harbour of which is shaped like a helix or

volute. Convoluted indeed. I suspect the harbour was called the Island's

Eye, a name which folk etymologized into Ireland's Eye by the late 17th

century. I would be stronger in my conviction about this if I knew of some

other placenames, on either side of the Atlantic, with "Eye" referring

to a kind of volute or spiral shape.

    Any takers?

            Philip Hiscock

            MUN Folklore & Language Archive

            Memorial University of Newfoundland

            St John's, Newfoundland

philiph[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]kean.ucs.mun.ca



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 16:31:39 -0800

From: "Thomas L. Clark"  tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]NEVADA.EDU 

Subject:   Re: 3 inches short



Your message dated: Mon, 8 Nov 1993 23:48:33 -0700

--------

  I grew up 150 miles south of Don Lance, on the Mexican border in South Texas

  and agree with most of the intuitions posted to date. The paraphrase "short

  BY three inches/dollars" seems best to capture the sense.

          --Rudy Troike



I grew up 1500 miles north of Don and Rudy, on the Montana/Canadian border.

"3 inches short" doesn't have to be paraphrased, because that's the

unmarked form for me.



-------------------------------------------------------

Thomas L. Clark English Department UNLV 89154

tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nevada.edu



Date:     Tue, 9 Nov 1993 11:15:41 -0600

From: Joan Livingston-Webber  webber[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CWIS.UNOMAHA.EDU 

Subject:   3" short



I would say the tablecloth is 3 inches short. I'd be more

likely to say this hem is 3 inches short, not having much

use for tablecloths. But I wouldn't say he is 3 inches

short (meaning too short for some purpose). (The giggle-

allusion is inadvertant, but I'm letting it stand.) I don't

think 3 inches short works for me with any animate subject. I

want to add some goal. The dog is 3 inches short of

AKC standards.



None of the other options works for me except the universal

one.



10 minutes late or early both work.



1st dialect = sw Pennsylvania, 1950-60's.

adult dialect adds from ND and IN. I don't know which one I

speak. I can't speak either and be heard as a native, tho if

I went home for long enough, I might.

--

Joan Livingston-Webber  webber[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]unomaha.edu

"It's hard to work with a group when you're omnipotent." -Q, TNG



Date:     Mon, 15 Nov 1993 22:31:55 -0400

From: George Graham  GGRAHAM[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]PSTCC.CC.TN.US 

Subject:   song



===============================================================

A question arose the other day.



Some of my nursing students told me about a tape which helped them learn

the parts of the body by using music to stimulate memory.



So I bought one for myself (actually I used the excuse that my 7th grader

needed it). As I was listening to one of the songs the phrase was used ...

heading down south ... the phrase was in relation to the food moving down into

 the stomach.



But I wasn't sure of the origin ... was it from the verticle position of a map

 on the

wall ... and south being DOWN ????



Anyone have an idea ???

George G

ggraham[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]pstcc.cc.tn.us



Date:     Tue, 16 Nov 1993 07:37:11 EST

From: BERGDAHL%A1.OUVAX.mrgate[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU

Subject:   Re: song



From:  NAME: David Bergdahl

    FUNC: English

    TEL: (614) 593-2783           BERGDAHL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]A1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAX 

To:   NAME: MX%"ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu"  MX%"ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu"[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MRGATE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAX 



The metaphor is fairly common: profits typically head south in a recession.

Analogously, dead cowboys head west [toward the setting sun].



David Bergdahl

Ohio University/Athens



Date:     Tue, 16 Nov 1993 11:58:00 CDT

From: Beth Lee Simon  BLSIMON[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MACC.WISC.EDU 

Subject:   an address



does anyone have the list address for the Functional Linguistics list?



if so, please contact me. Thanks



beth simon

blsimon[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]macc.wisc.edu



Date:     Tue, 16 Nov 1993 21:31:00 CDT

From: Beth Lee Simon  BLSIMON[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MACC.WISC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: song



Has anyone else already mentioned that "gone south" means, or can mean,

"died"?



Beth Simon

DARE



Date:     Tue, 16 Nov 1993 23:57:50 CST

From: "Donald M. Lance"  ENGDL%MIZZOU1.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: song



Doesn't 'south' collocate with 'down' and 'north' with 'up' in general?

       Would any of you ever say "up south" or "down north"?

We use 'out' with 'east' and 'west', and 'down' with 'east'. We wouldn't

say "out north" or "out south" or "down west", would we?

These seem to me to be set expressions, and certainly mapping practices

contribute to these uses, but map directions don't  explain "down east".

                     DMLance





Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 09:54:57 -0230

From: "Philip Hiscock, MUN Folklore & Language Archive" philiph[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]KEAN.UCS.MUN.CA 

Subject:   Down North



"Donald M. Lance"  ENGDL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIZZOU1.BITNET  said,

 

 Doesn't 'south' collocate with 'down' and 'north' with 'up' in general?

        Would any of you ever say "up south" or "down north"?

 We use 'out' with 'east' and 'west', and 'down' with 'east'. We wouldn't

 say "out north" or "out south" or "down west", would we?

 These seem to me to be set expressions, and certainly mapping practices

 contribute to these uses, but map directions don't  explain "down east".

                      DMLance



    Here in Newfoundland one hears "down north" with pretty high

frequency, along with the folk explanation that old maps used to be

printed "upside-down." One also hears phrases like "up the Shore"

meaning south along what is called the Southern Shore (which runs

north-south, near St John's). "Up" often means "south", but only

rarely do you hear the collocation "up south."

    "Down" a bay usually means towards the "bottom" (= the most

inland part) no matter what direction that takes you on the map.

    The direction or movement from Newfoundland to Canada is

usually referred to as "up to Canada", or "up to the mainland" - this

is more or less west on the map. Although the phrase "down east" is often

used by Mainers and Maritime Canadians ( = PEI, NB and NS), I don't think

it is used by Newfoundlanders to refer to their home territory.



    In Shakespeare's sonnet, I forget which number, he uses

"lowlands" or "nether regions" for the pubic area, but I can't remember

whether he uses a "south" metaphor. It seems to me he might have.

 Does anyone have the sonnets close at hand?

                -Philip Hiscock

philiph[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]kean.ucs.mun.ca



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 08:00:00 CST

From: Edward Callary  TB0EXC1%NIU.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 



 'South' equates with 'down' in a number of ways. I agree with Don

Lance that these are set expressions. I do, though, find

'out east' very awkward; I prefer 'back East.'

Remember my rapidly receding high school days, when a

female student had a tad of slip showing, we would always

say to her 'It's snowing down South.'



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 10:27:01 CST

From: Dennis Baron  debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UIUC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: song



 We use 'out' with 'east' and 'west', and 'down' with 'east'.



Yes, Don, but down east is Maine, and Maine is north. People in R.I.

say they're going down to Boston, which is north.



Dennis

--



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 09:51:33 -0600

From: Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject:   Re: song



  Yes, Don, but down east is Maine, and Maine is north. People in R.I.

  say they're going down to Boston, which is north.



Just as people in Cambridge go "up" to London.

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 12:11:07 -0500

From: GURT%GUVAX.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu

Subject:   Re: song



I think *everyone* in England goes "up" to London.



Joan C. Cook

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

gurt[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 10:24:47 -0800

From: Roger Vanderveen  rvander[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ICHIPS.INTEL.COM 

Subject:   song



  I think *everyone* in England goes "up" to London.



I disagree. In keeping with the subject of this message, I quote part of an

folk song:



    A north country maid

     Down to London had strayed,

    Although with her nature

     It did not agree.



I will add though, in Cornwall in the southwest, they talk about going

"up to England". This would be generally a northeast direction.



-- Roger



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 14:41:12 CST

From: Dennis Baron  debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UIUC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: song



In Message Wed, 17 Nov 1993 09:51:33 -0600,

 Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU  writes:



   Yes, Don, but down east is Maine, and Maine is north. People in R.I.

   say they're going down to Boston, which is north.

 

 Just as people in Cambridge go "up" to London.

   --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



They also go up to university and if they aren't good get sent down.

Which means, I suppose, they can go both up and down to London from

Cambridge. Rather like the old days when I walked 5 miles to school

in the snow uphill both ways.



Dennis

--



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 14:45:00 CST

From: Dennis Baron  debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UIUC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: song



In Message Wed, 17 Nov 1993 12:11:07 -0500, GURT[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.bitnet writes:



 I think *everyone* in England goes "up" to London.

 

 Joan C. Cook

 Department of Linguistics

 Georgetown University

 gurt[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



And here in the US, depending on local custom, we go uptown or downtown

to get to the main part of town. I grew up in NYC--in Queens--and

when we went to Manhattan we always said we were going "To the city."

To go uptown or to go downtown also means to do something with energy,

to solo (musically or otherwise). And of course, crosstown busses run

all night. Doo dah. Doo dah.



Dennis

--



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 17:33:22 EST

From: BERGDAHL%A1.OUVAX.mrgate[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU

Subject:   Re: song



From:  NAME: David Bergdahl

    FUNC: English

    TEL: (614) 593-2783           BERGDAHL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]A1[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAX 

To:   NAME: MX%"ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu"  MX%"ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu"[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MRGATE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAX 



Don,

Down east makes sense as a direction: on the maine coast a storm that comes from

the Atlantic provinces of Canada comes down [out of the] east.



David Bergdahl Ohio University/Athens "Gateway to West Virginia"

BERGDAHL [AT SYMBOL GOES HERE] OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 21:26:42 -0600

From: Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject:   Bounced Mail



When including a previous posting, be sure to edit out all references

to ADS-L in the headers.



  Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 21:48:16 -0500

  From: BITNET list server at UGA (1.7f)  LISTSERV[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

  Subject:   ADS-L: error report from LEVY.BARD.EDU

  To: Natalie Maynor  MAYNOR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

 

  The enclosed mail file, found in the ADS-L reader and shown under the spoolid

  6914 in the console log, has been identified as a possible delivery error

  notice for the following reason: "Sender:", "From:" or "Reply-To:" field

  pointing to the list has been found in mail body.

 

  ---------------------- Message in error (40 lines) -------------------------

  Date: Wed, 17 Nov 93 21:47:41 EST

  From: kelly[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]levy.bard.edu (Robert Kelly)

  Subject: Re: song

 

  Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 09:51:33 -0600

  From: Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

  Subject:   Re: song

 

    Yes, Don, but down east is Maine, and Maine is north. People in R.I.

    say they're going down to Boston, which is north.

 

  Just as people in Cambridge go "up" to London.

   --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)

 

  and people thrown out of Cambridge, whether they are headed N, E, S or W

  are "sent down."

 

  rk



Date:     Wed, 17 Nov 1993 21:53:13 CST

From: "Donald M. Lance"  ENGDL%MIZZOU1.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Long-Awaited Book



The long-awaited book on language variation teaching and research is "in the

mail." Glowka and I got preview copies of the paperback last week.

LANGUAGE VARIATION IN NORTH AMERICAN ENGLISH: RESEARCH AND TEACHING, eds.

A. Wayne Glowka & Donald M. Lance. Published by MLA. Looks really good.



They've highlighted this volume in their latest publications announcement --

a two-page spread, twice as much space as they gave any other publication.

I understand they're gonna display it prominently at the book exhibit in

Toronto. And we'll have a copy at the BYOB session at ADS.



Thirty-nine original articles -- including Wolfram, Cassidy, Harold Allen,

and some luminaries too.       DMLance



Date:     Thu, 18 Nov 1993 07:56:42 +0500

From: Robert Howren  howren[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GIBBS.OIT.UNC.EDU 

Subject:   down north



Donald M. Lance wrote:



 Doesn't 'south' collocate with 'down' and 'north' with 'up' in general?

 Would any of you ever say "up south" or "down north"? We use 'out' with

 'east' and 'west', and 'down' with 'east'. We wouldn't say "out north" or

 "out south" or "down west", would we? These seem to me to be set

 expressions, and certainly mapping practices contribute to these uses, but

 map directions don't explain "down east".



In at least the western part of the McKenzie District of the Northwest

Territories of Canada, the regular association of "down" with north is due

to the presence of the McKenzie River, which flows for a thousand miles

north from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic coast. In the NWT, one goes

"down to Inuvik," which is at the McKenzie delta. Incidentally, from the

Territories, one goes "outside" to the provinces, or "out to Edmonton."



--Bob Howren  Dept of Linguistics   UNC-Chapel Hill

 r_howren[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]unc.edu



Date:     Thu, 18 Nov 1993 10:58:25 EST

From: Boyd Davis  FEN00BHD[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UNCCVM.UNCC.EDU 

Subject:   up south



"up south" has been in use here, in the Charlotte area, for at least the

last 25 years, primarily by the African-American community, with a

restricted and ironic meaning. The 'last 25 years' refers only to how

long I've been hearing this term. My colleague Mary Harper says that it

is an ironic, tongue-in-cheek way of saying that African-Americans find

the same problems above the Mason-Dixon line as below. Exchanges like

"Where's Anne been lately?" "She's been up south in Philadelphia/New

York/etc" mean that Anne went to Philadelphia/etc for more than a casual

visit to relatives or friends, probably related to employment, and found

conditions no different. Harper adds that the phrase has probably been

in use, at least locally, since WWII. African-American students at our

university who have grown up in the area often tease A-A students coming

here from New Jersey, New York, DC area, etc., by saying that they come

from 'up south' -- which is a multiple message. Part of the message is

"Excuse me, please, you may drop your sophisticated manner and your

expectations that I am a rustic, because you actually live up south -

that is, you have grown up under the same social realities that operate

on me, though you may not realize it - and this country mouse may know

a bit more about the real world than you do."

   Harper reports that she has never heard *"down north" in any

sense. She sends a question for the group about "outin'":

People in the Piedmont NC area have referred - up until a few years

ago - to flannel nightwear as "outin'" (from 'outing flannel'). In

the last few years, this usage seems to have disappeared and its

occurence limited to the over-50 - and especially over-70 - group.

Is this usage regionally restricted?



Date:     Thu, 18 Nov 1993 15:45:45 CST

From: Dennis Baron  debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UIUC.EDU 

Subject:   Re: up south



 She sends a question for the group about "outin'":

 People in the Piedmont NC area have referred - up until a few years

 ago - to flannel nightwear as "outin'" (from 'outing flannel'). In

 the last few years, this usage seems to have disappeared and its

 occurence limited to the over-50 - and especially over-70 - group.

 Is this usage regionally restricted?



Regionally restricted or not, outing may be driven out by the new

meaning of outing.



--

Dennis



Date:     Fri, 19 Nov 1993 07:54:58 +0500

From: Robert Howren  howren[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GIBBS.OIT.UNC.EDU 

Subject:   outin'



On Boyd Davis's query about "outin'":

I remember "outin" in this meaning from my childhood in northwest

Georgia. (I'm 64.)

==Bob Howren Dept. of Linguistics UNC-Chapel Hill r_howren[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]unc.edu==



Date:     Fri, 19 Nov 1993 11:03:23 +22305606

From: "Ellen Johnson Faq. Filosofia y Hdes."  ejohnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ABELLO.SECI.UCHILE.CL 

Subject:   uptown/barrios altos



In Atlanta there was traditionally an Uptown and a Downtown, the latter being

Five Points and the former near where Macy's is today. This may go back to a

time when there was actually some fairly empty space separating the two.

I've only heard it from natives of 50+ years old. It doesn't seem to have much

meaning currently. For one thing, what may have once been two separate

commercial districts runs together now, and for another, there aren't as many

natives left working downtown who might make this distinction.



I would only use 'uptown' in this restricted sense, I think. Here in Santiago,

I always come downtown to work on my e-mail at the computer center of the

university, never uptown.



The 'suburb' (very urban to me) where I live is the beginning of the 'barrios

altos', or, roughly, 'high neighborhoods'. This includes Providencia and newer

suburbs toward the east. The only catch is that there is a negligible, if any,

difference in altitude, as far as I can tell. It IS in the direction toward

the Cordillera of the Andes, but it is not hilly at all, except for the

isolated bumps or 'cerros' that occur at various locations around and in the

city. It might be a metaphor arising in the fact that these neighborhoods are

inhabited mostly by the rich. What may have been a metaphor is taken quite

literally, however. Many people have explained to me that there is less

pollution, that the air is clearer in these barrios altos (presumably because

of their height), but again, if this

is so, I can't tell any difference. Perhaps they breathe easier there, but for

other reasons... 'Up' is always applied to this area.



Ellen Johnson

ejohnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]abello.seci.uchile.cl



Date:     Fri, 19 Nov 1993 14:06:49 EST

From: BERGDAHL%A1.OUVAX.mrgate[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU

Subject:   Re: uptown/barrios altos



Here in Athens Ohio--one of those college towns three blocks long and two blocks

wide--for thirty years at least the kids have said they "uptown" to the bars

because Athens is too small to have a downtown!

David Bergdahl Ohio University/Athens "Gateway to West Virginia"

BERGDAHL [AT SYMBOL GOES HERE] OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU



Date:     Fri, 19 Nov 1993 17:42:35 -0500

From: Cathy Ball  CBALL%GUVAX.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: Diversity of accents



Thanks to everyone who responded to my query a while back re: diversity

of accents in the U.S. Here's the outcome (sorry it took so long!; original

copies are on their way to Robert Wachal and Donald Livingston, who got

cited.)



 -- Cathy Ball (Georgetown)



----------------------------------------------------------------------

Washington Post, Friday 10/15/1993 p. D5 (Style Section)



Why Things Are

by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post Staff Writer



James R, Odom of Olney asks:

"Why do people in different sections of the country speak with regional

accents?"



    Dear Jim: We passed this question along to Cathy Ball, a linguist at

Georgetown University, and she then sent it out to the Internet (you know,

that big web of computers that spans the globe) to her colleagues in the

American Dialect Society.



    We learned that accents are basically a product of immigration.

German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, English and French

immigrants and African slaves in the Deep South, Scotch-Irish settlers in

the hills of Appalachia, Scandinavians in Minnesota, and so on. Accents

can mutate over time. "Members of lower socioeconomic classes often

imitate the speech of those in the class above them. The class above them

then adopts other features to distinguish them from the classes below

them," notes Robert Wachal of the University of Iowa. (Before the

Thurston Howells developed that lockjaw accent, they said "y'all" just like

everyone else.)



    What surprised us most is that almost everyone said that

Americans don't have a great diversity of accents or dialects, at least not

anymore. Accents are preserved by geographic isolation, and with the

advent of mass media, many accents are melting away. Soon we'll all

sound like Tom Brokaw (but without the slight lisp). "The diversity of

accents in the U.S. is fairly narrow compared to, say, the diversity of

accents within just London proper," says Donald Livingston of the

University of Washington.

    So maybe everyone should vow, this moment, to start pronouncing

words in a peculiar fashion (pronounced puh-KOOL-ya FATCH-un).



Date:     Sat, 20 Nov 1993 14:16:35 CST

From: "Donald M. Lance"  ENGDL%MIZZOU1.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: Long-Awaited Book



I've had a request to post more information on the "long-awaited" book.

Language Variation in North American English: Research and Teaching, eds.

A. Wayne Glowka and Donald M. Lance. Modern Language Association. Available

in December 1993. Cloth ISBN 389-X[E301C] $37.50 (MLA members $30).

Paper ISBN 390-3[E301P] $19.75 (MLA members $15.80.

Modern Language Association, 10 Astor Place, New York NY 10003-6981. Phone

orders 212/614-6384. Fax order 212/477-9863.



As you're thinking of books for your research and/or your dialect seminars,

also keep in mind another excellent ADS Centennial 1993 book:

American Dialect Research, ed. Dennis R. Preston. John Benjamins, 1993.

Maybe Dennis can post ordering info on the List.    DMLance



Date:     Sat, 20 Nov 1993 14:30:02 CST

From: "Donald M. Lance"  ENGDL%MIZZOU1.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   Re: outin'



I remember my mother (born sw Arkansas) talking about outing (night)gowns.

The fabric looked like flannel to me.

                   DMLance



Date:     Sat, 20 Nov 1993 14:49:53 -0600

From: Alan Slotkin  ARS7950%TNTECH.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject:   linguistic nationalism



I have an undergraduate student who has become interested in the politics of

language, especially the use of a majority language to repress minorities,

English-only style movements, and related topics. As this is far removed

from my areas of interest, I'm at a loss on recommending recent--and fairly

elementary--sources for him. Any suggestions. I'd appreciate your

responding directly to me:



Alan Slotkin

ARS7950[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]TNTECH.BITNET



Thanks.



Alan



Date:     Sat, 20 Nov 1993 18:25:32 -0800

From: "Thomas L. Clark"  tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]REDROCK.NEVADA.EDU 

Subject:   Re: uptown/barrios altos



Your message dated: Fri, 19 Nov 1993 14:06:49 EST

--------

  From:  NAME: David Bergdahl

  Here in Athens Ohio--one of those college towns three blocks long and two blo

    ***cks

  wide--for thirty years at least the kids have said they "uptown" to the bars

  because Athens is too small to have a downtown!

  David Bergdahl Ohio University/Athens "Gateway to West Virginia"

  BERGDAHL [AT SYMBOL GOES HERE] OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU



As I recall Athens (fondly) David, I remember that from the East Quad,

students had to struggle up a steep hill to get to the uptown bars. Same

held true for the South Quad, "down" by the stadium (Bobcat's Sandbox).

Most of the dorms were down in these hollers, and only the frats were

"up" on the hill, near admin, and Oh Yes, My Lovely, the English Dept.

  In fact, as I recall, it was uphill both ways from where I lived on

Stewart Street.



-------------------------------------------------------

Thomas L. Clark English Department UNLV 89154 (Gateway to Idaho)

tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nevada.edu



Date:   Tue, 23 Nov 1993 00:00:48 -0500

From: Automatic digest processor  LISTSERV[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga.cc.uga.edu 

Subject: ADS-L Digest - 20 Nov 1993 to 22 Nov 1993



There are 13 messages totalling 317 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. linguistic nationalism (2)

 2. Diversity of accents (10)

 3. song



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 08:36:21 -0500

From:  "William A. Kretzschmar, Jr."  billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ATLAS.UGA.EDU 

Subject: Re: linguistic nationalism



I think the language planning section of Ralph Fasold's *The

Sociolinguistics of Society* (Blackwell, 1984) would be an excellent

place to start (the last three chapters, 70 pp.). If your student is

motivated, you might also suggest the three chapters before that, on

language attitudes, choice, and maintenance (c. 100 pp.). Our English

First movement seems to me to be motivated by just the collection of

fears and special interests that everybody else in the world of language

planning is trying to deal with.



******************************************************************************

Bill Kretzschmar         Phone:  706-542-2246

Dept. of English         FAX:   706-542-2181

University of Georgia      Internet: billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hyde.park.uga.edu

Athens, GA 30602-6205      Bitnet:  wakjengl[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 10:16:52 CST

From:  salikoko mufwene  mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



In Message Fri, 19 Nov 1993 17:42:35 -0500,

 Cathy Ball  CBALL%GUVAX.BITNET[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]vma.cc.nd.edu  writes:



 Thanks to everyone who responded to my query a while back re: diversity

 of accents in the U.S. Here's the outcome (sorry it took so long!; original

 copies are on their way to Robert Wachal and Donald Livingston, who got

 cited.)

 

  -- Cathy Ball (Georgetown)

 

 

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------

 Washington Post, Friday 10/15/1993 p. D5 (Style Section)

 

 Why Things Are

 by Joel Achenbach, Washington Post Staff Writer

 

 James R, Odom of Olney asks:

 "Why do people in different sections of the country speak with regional

 accents?"

 

     Dear Jim: We passed this question along to Cathy Ball, a linguist at

 Georgetown University, and she then sent it out to the Internet (you know,

 that big web of computers that spans the globe) to her colleagues in the

 American Dialect Society.

 

     We learned that accents are basically a product of immigration.

 German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania, English and French

 immigrants and African slaves in the Deep South, Scotch-Irish settlers in

 the hills of Appalachia, Scandinavians in Minnesota, and so on. Accents

 can mutate over time. "Members of lower socioeconomic classes often

 imitate the speech of those in the class above them. The class above them

 then adopts other features to distinguish them from the classes below

 them," notes Robert Wachal of the University of Iowa. (Before the

 Thurston Howells developed that lockjaw accent, they said "y'all" just like

 everyone else.)

 

     What surprised us most is that almost everyone said that

 Americans don't have a great diversity of accents or dialects, at least not

 anymore. Accents are preserved by geographic isolation, and with the

 advent of mass media, many accents are melting away. Soon we'll all

 sound like Tom Brokaw (but without the slight lisp). "The diversity of

 accents in the U.S. is fairly narrow compared to, say, the diversity of

 accents within just London proper," says Donald Livingston of the

 University of Washington.

     So maybe everyone should vow, this moment, to start pronouncing

 words in a peculiar fashion (pronounced puh-KOOL-ya FATCH-un).



The above is supposed to be a joke, right?

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Linguistics, U. of Chicago

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 10:20:57 -700

From:  Keith Russell  wkr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CPU.US.DYNIX.COM 

Subject: Re: song



On Tue, 16 Nov 1993, Donald M. Lance wrote:



  Doesn't 'south' collocate with 'down' and 'north' with 'up' in general?

         Would any of you ever say "up south" or "down north"?

  We use 'out' with 'east' and 'west', and 'down' with 'east'. We wouldn't

  say "out north" or "out south" or "down west", would we?

  These seem to me to be set expressions, and certainly mapping practices

  contribute to these uses, but map directions don't  explain "down east".

                      DMLance



I agree with you on 'down' and 'up.' 'Out west' is also fine, but 'out

east/north/south' and 'down west/east/north' are not. 'Back east,'

however, is fine.



Keith Russell



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 12:55:56 CST

From:  Mike Picone  MPICONE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UA1VM.BITNET 

Subject: Re: linguistic nationalism



In response to Alan Slotkin's request:



English only policies were established with regards to education in the

Louisiana public schools in the early 1900s in order to supress varieties of

French (which had the simultaneious effect of suppressing Creole and Native

American dialects).



A good overview of the evolving situation, concerning French at least, is

available in the following:



Ancelet, Barry Jean. 1988. A Perspective on teaching the problem language in

 Louisiana. The French Review 61:345-356.



Mike Picone

U Alabama



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 13:07:00 CST

From:  Cynthia Bernstein  BERN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DUCVAX.AUBURN.EDU 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



The article Sali mentions, claiming the disappearance of American

dialect diversity, reminds me of one that appeared last February in

the New York Times. I'm afraid it's the impression of the media that

the media are making us all sound alike. Some of us may soon be seeking

other employment.

Cynthia Bernstein, Auburn U



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:08:00 EST

From:  "Dennis.Preston"  22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



I hope that Sali Mufwene is right and that the putative newspaper article on

'dialects' is a joke.

If not, it perpetrates two of the silliest unprofessional notions around (ones

my beginning undergraduate Language and Culture students could refute). 1)

That linguistic change is instituted by the upper classes and then abandoned

after lower status groups begin to sound like them. See any of the intensive

socioinguistic work on change in the last three decades to show that all

carefully studied change we are aware of beings in lower status groups and

works its way up (unless it is noticed and clobbered, of course). 2) Careful

studies (even of lexicon!), for example Ellen Johnson's recent dissertation

from Georgia, show that dialect areas are just as differentiated today as

thjey were when the were first studied in the 30's - quite a long time for the

media to have had an effect - NOT. That they were never as distinct as some

European dialects is granted, but that information is embedded in a popular

rather than scientific view. (The reasoning bhind all this, of course, is that

we learn our basic lanuage patterns (our 'vernacular' if you will) from

interaction (peers, siblings, other family) not from talking heads on TV.

I hope Sali is right; dialectology has a bad enough reputation among 'real'

linguists.

Dennis Preston  22709mgr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]msu.bitnet 



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:15:57 -0500

From:  "William A. Kretzschmar, Jr."  billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ATLAS.UGA.EDU 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



While the newspaper article may not be a joke, the media are still capable

of noticing dialect differences: WSB, the 50,000W Atlanta AM station,

interviewed me during the playoffs so that I could explain the funny

accents up in Philadelphia. (Needless to say, I found irony in the

request on *many* counts). I didn't hear what WSB edited out of the

phone interview, but it was scheduled to play the morning of game 5.



******************************************************************************

Bill Kretzschmar         Phone:  706-542-2246

Dept. of English         FAX:   706-542-2181

University of Georgia      Internet: billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hyde.park.uga.edu

Athens, GA 30602-6205      Bitnet:  wakjengl[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:26:49 -0500

From:  Cathy Ball  CBALL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



For those who may have joined the list after I posted my original request ...

The Washington Post called me for help answering a reader's query, and I

passed on the query to ADS-L. The request generated a number of responses,

which I faxed to the Post, and they chose several. Voila. Actually, the

end result is not as bad as some of the things the media do with our input.

And as for the absence of 'change from above', noted by one of the recent

'is this a joke?' messages, I may note in passing the entry of 'who' into

the restrictive relative paradigm.



 -- Cathy Ball (Georgetown)

  cball[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:47:53 -0500

From:  GURT[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.BITNET

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



Well said, Dennis Preston!



And a recent thread on the Sign Language Linguistics list concerned

hearing children of deaf parents. According to the studies cited, these

children apparently don't learn to SPEAK from listening to the television.



I thought one of the things we learned from Genie is that children

learn language from *interaction*, not from mere exposure.



I remember as a child asking my cousin in South Carolina why she

talked like that, even though nobody on TV talked like that (i.e.,

everybody on TV spoke (more or less) standard American English). She

insisted that she didn't talk any differently than people on TV -- my

impression at the time was that she was arguing that she couldn't hear

a difference between her dialect and the standard.



Can we infer that you learn your dialect from interaction, not mere

exposure, AND that dialects spoken by people you don't interact with

don't sound like different dialects?



Joan C. Cook

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

gurt[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 17:41:54 -0500

From:  Cathy Ball  CBALL[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



Dear Salikoko -



   The above is supposed to be a joke, right?



If you meant the whole message, no! But the Post column in question is

a more-or-less tongue in cheek one - I can send you the original ADS

postings that underlie the column, if you're interested.



 -- Cathy



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 16:59:30 CST

From:  salikoko mufwene  mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



In Message Mon, 22 Nov 1993 13:07:00 CST,

 Cynthia Bernstein  BERN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ducvax.auburn.edu  writes:



 The article Sali mentions, claiming the disappearance of American

 dialect diversity, reminds me of one that appeared last February in

 the New York Times. I'm afraid it's the impression of the media that

 the media are making us all sound alike. Some of us may soon be seeking

 other employment.

 Cynthia Bernstein, Auburn U



Sorry, Cynthia. I made a comment on the report from Cathy Ball. Making

allowance for media distortions in reporting academic positions, I just

thought the intention must have been to entertain subscribers to the ADS

List.

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Linguistics, U. of Chicago

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 21:04:23 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



Response to Dennis Preston's note:

    Don't forget the 'parachute effect' in modern conditions, when

Chicago vowels jump to Phoenix without, as in olden days, traveling across

the intervening farm and ranch country. It is almost certainly NOT the media

which are responsible, since they are often the LAST to reflect such changes.

But change is occurring constantly at all social levels; which mutations

survive and spread is often a matter of the particular local circumstances.

Were it not for the influence of the upper class in post-Norman England, we

would not have so many French words incorporated into English, and would

still be using more of the good o

Old English vocabulary. It would make German easier to learn. Older upper-

class usages in turn survive in relic areas. Unfortunately, American English

IS being homogenized at the lexical level, with so few people left on the farm,

and most people getting 'school-larning', if not in school, via their 7 hours

a day of TV and the supermarket.

                --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 22 Nov 1993 21:15:41 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



Joan,

    It's not so simple as we dialectologists, always going for the larger

picture, like to make out. Individuals will be individuals, at least at times,

no matter how much we try to squeeze them into our isoglosses or sociolinguis-

tic variables. I remember reading an interview some years ago with someone

who grew up in Brooklyn, in which he commented that his friends early on said

that he was eventually going to leave Brooklyn when he grew up, because he did

not sound like his peers. And he did leave. Unfortunately the interview was

printed, so there was no way to prove this, but it does suggest people are

not Skinner-conditioned, and may select which aspects of the environment they

will attend to as most salient. I have a colleague from Montana who sounds

like a Britisher.

        Rudy Troike



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 20 Nov 1993 to 22 Nov 1993

************************************************



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 23 Nov 1993 09:06:05 CST

From:  salikoko mufwene  mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



Much of what is reported in that article is disputable, to say the least.

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Linguistics, U. of Chicago

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 23 Nov 1993 09:10:39 CST

From:  salikoko mufwene  mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



Dear Cathy:

 Thank you for your reply. Yes, I'm interested in seeing the postings.

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Linguistics, U. of Chicago

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 23 Nov 1993 09:46:00 CST

From:  Cynthia Bernstein  BERN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]DUCVAX.AUBURN.EDU 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



The New York Times article (Feb. 14, 1993) I mentioned earlier quotes

William Stewart as saying "We all sound like TV announcers. . . .

West Coast norms have taken over the whole country." Do you agree with

me, Sali, that both inner-city Chicago and rural Alabama are still

relatively safe from the invasion of "West Coast norms"?

--Cynthia Bernstein



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 23 Nov 1993 10:23:41 -0800

From:  Roger Vanderveen  rvander[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ICHIPS.INTEL.COM 

Subject: Diversity of accents



Cynthia says:

  The New York Times article (Feb. 14, 1993) I mentioned earlier quotes

  William Stewart as saying "We all sound like TV announcers. . . .

  West Coast norms have taken over the whole country."



Having been born and raised on the west coast, I have always been

surrounded by people from all over the country (and world), and the

diversity of accents is still alive and well. I seem to be in the

minority, but I've found it easy to spot regional accents from the

south, deep south, far west, midwest and northeast areas of the

country.



On the other hand, I've noticed TV announcers in Mississippi who have

hardly a trace of a southern accent. I think William Stewart bases his

reality on too much TV.



-- ROger



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 23 Nov 1993 12:30:09 CST

From:  salikoko mufwene  mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU 

Subject: Re: Diversity of accents



Yes, I agree with you, Cynthia. I am shocked by the statement attributed to

William Stewart... but he also once believed in African American Vernacular

English being the result of decreolization from a Gullah-like variety

presumably once spoken by all African Americans (i.e., ancestors of those we

know today)! In any case...

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Linguistics, U. of Chicago

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 22 Nov 1993 to 23 Nov 1993

************************************************



There are 8 messages totalling 244 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. Query: "run over" (2)

 2. Dialect Diversity?

 3. diversity of accents (3)

 4. testi

 5. Forwarding



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 10:29:36 -0500

From:  Mike Agnes  by971[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CLEVELAND.FREENET.EDU 

Subject: Query: "run over"



Query:



LDOCE2 (1987) marks the phrasal verb "run over"

with the symbol  - , indicating, according to

the front matter, that "the object can come either

before ["over"] or after it. But if the object is

a pronoun . . . , it MUST come directly after the

verb."



As a speaker of American English, must I accept

that this accurately describes British English?

My American English, for example, permits both

all of the following:



  She ran him over.

  She ran over him.

  She ran the idiot over.

  She ran over the dog.



Can any speaker of British English confirm that

only the second sentence above is impermissible

in that national variety, and that the others are

grammatical?



Do any speakers of _American_ English sense

differences among the sentences? (Some

informants have detected different registers;

others, the presence or lack of intent. Some

find sentence three marginal.)



Four notes:



(1) We have one printed citation that we presume

is from a writer of British English and that

violates the LDOCE2 prescription:

  "She falls in love with Michael Edwards, a doctor

  who almost runs her over on May Morning, and then

  takes her to breakfast to apologize."

 (2) We note that LDAE retains the  -  symbol in the

entry for "run over," implying that the restrictions

apply in American English. We believe this is in error.

 (3) We note a semantic and syntactic distinction between

the verb in the above sentences and the verb "run over"

in a sample sentence in Quirk, Greenbaum et al.,

"A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language"

(1985):

     The car ran over the bump.

This is given as an example of a Type I prepositional

verb, marked "by the inability of the particle to be

moved to a position after the following noun phrase"

as well as by the fact that "the order of particle

and pronoun is different." The semantic difference is

tellingly mirrored in LDOCE2's definition of "run over":

  "to knock down and pass over the top of"

Bumps, unlike rabbits and other potential roadkill (all

marked as animate), are not knocked down. Also, in

American English the sentence

  *We ran the bump over.

is either ungrammatical or a misprint.

  (4) We have not been able to check the treatment

of "run over" in Anthony Cowie's second edition of

the "Oxford Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs" (1993).



Many thanks.



      Mike Agnes

       Internet: by91[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]cleveland.freenet.edu

        Bitnet: by971%cleveland.freenet.edu[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]cunyvm

          Fax: 216 579 1255



------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 10:54:56 -0500

From:  ALICE FABER  FABER%LENNY[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]VENUS.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject: Dialect Diversity?



When the New York Times article on the loss of the traditional NYC accent

(e.g., toidy-toid street) was printed last year, I had the same reaction that

others on the list have expressed to the comments attributed to Stewart. But

we should bear in mind that the few sentences printed were probably distilled

out of a longer interview, and many qualifications expressed would have been

edited out in the name of pithiness.



Alice Faber

Faber[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]Yalehask.bitnet



------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 13:27:50 +22305606

From:  "Ellen Johnson Faq. Filosofia y Hdes."  ejohnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ABELLO.SECI.UCHILE.CL 

Subject: diversity of accents



sorry to jump into this discussion late, but I can't get onto the network every

day to check the mail. I have to take exception to Dennis Preston's statement

about my research findings, though I appreciate the citation.;-)



I studied the effects of age, sex, race, region, rurality, and education on

language variation and found that though region was the most important variable

in my analysis of 1930s LAMSAS data, it was the least important one for the

1990 data. Regionally-defined dialect areas are still there, but I think they

are becoming less distinct, at least for the lexicon. I don't have the figures

on hand but I'll try to post them early next week for anyone who is interested.



It is ironic to find my dissertation cited as part of the anti-media-influence

position, since in it I actually took the admittedly unpopular stance of

claiming a certain amount of influence from the media on ling. change. I don't

limit this influence to TV and movies, but include the print media as well.

Lexical acquisition differs from, e.g., acquisition of one's regional

pronunciation, because we are continually learning and using new words

throughout our lifetimes. Thus, the greatly increased amount of information

available to people today, not just through the media, but also through public

education (greatly improved since LAMSAS speakers went to school) has provided

them with lots of opportunities to learn new words.



This is reflected in my findings in two ways. The first is the size of the set

of vocabulary items I collected compared to Guy Lowman (even though we averaged

about the same number of responses per informant). The number of words in the

sample increased almost 50% (again, figures to follow later). The second way I

think TV, etc., makes a difference is in the amount of change linked to a

particular social or regional group. By far the majority of the vocabulary

changes that occurred between 1930 and 1990 were not cases of change led by any

particular group. Lexical change influenced by the media could spread rapidly

across the nation without regard for social class. See, for example, the

Algeos' column on New Words in AmSpeech for words that have been encouraged by

the media. Another example is the way the term 'African-American' suddenly

became well-known once Jesse Jackson's speech was widely reported in the news,

though in this case, the word was already in use by a certain group of

speakers.



Finally, change from above does occur, at least in the lexicon. You can read

more about all this in a forthcoming article in Language Variation and Change.

I'm really interested in all the responses, since I looked for citations for my

dissertation from linguists refuting the myth that television would lead to

homogeneity in Am. Eng. and it was hard to find this discussion in print

anywhere.



Ellen Johnson

ejohnson[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]abello.seci.uchile.cl



------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 09:51:10 -700

From:  Keith Russell  wkr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]CPU.US.DYNIX.COM 

Subject: Re: Query: "run over"



On Wed, 24 Nov 1993, Mike Agnes wrote:



  Query:

 

    She ran him over.

    She ran over him.

    She ran the idiot over.

    She ran over the dog.

 

  Can any speaker of British English confirm that

  only the second sentence above is impermissible

  in that national variety, and that the others are

  grammatical?

 

  Do any speakers of _American_ English sense

  differences among the sentences? (Some

  informants have detected different registers;

  others, the presence or lack of intent. Some

  find sentence three marginal.)

 



I am not a speaker of British English. However, as a native speaker of

Canadian English, and a speaker of "American" English as a second

language, I find all four sentences grammatical. I do feel a difference

between one and three on the one hand, and two and four on the other, but

am having difficulty identifying just what the distinction is. It does

seem to me that two and four are somewhat more standard and less colloquial.



Keith Russell



------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 13:49:00 -0600

From:  "Timothy C. Frazer"  mftcf[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UXA.ECN.BGU.EDU 

Subject: testi



practicing entering ads-l



------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 16:23:34 -0600

From:  Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject: Forwarding



For some reason this mail bounced back to me. Natalie



  Date: Wed, 24 Nov 93 11:36:12 CST

  From: Evan.Norris%VPAcad%VH[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]topnet.uwsa.edu

  Subject: re: Query: "run over"

  To: [AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA.CC.UGA.EDU:owner-ads-l[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA.CC.UGA.EDU

 

  Mike Agnes asked for judgments on these four sentences:

 

 

   1. She ran him over.

   2. She ran over him.

   3. She ran the idiot over.

   4. She ran over the dog.

 

  My judgement as a native speaker of American English is that the sentences

  are all grammatical, although 1 and 3 are more marked. There is also an

  ambiguity in 1 and 3 involving the sense of 'run over' as 'deliver to

  someone', as in 'I'll run it right over.' I admit that it does seem a bit

  contrived, but there you are...

 

  Evan Norris

  UW System Administration

  ejn%vpacad%vh[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]topnet.uwsa.edu

  (608) 262-3526



------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 17:55:38 CST

From:  salikoko mufwene  mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



In response to Ellen Johnson's very useful information, does denial of

media-induced homogeneity entail denial of media influence? I thought we

were concerned with the first claim.

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Linguistics, U. of Chicago

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531



------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 21:45:57 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



Is there anybody who doesn't know who Barney is?

                        --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 23 Nov 1993 to 24 Nov 1993

************************************************



There are 4 messages totalling 76 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. diversity of accents (4)



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Wed, 24 Nov 1993 22:17:22 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



More re change from above:

    In my investigation of "McDavid's Law" (|z| --  |d|/__N) several years

ago (see Journal of English Linguistcs), it was very clear that the reversal

of this change, once prevalent among the upper crust, was proceeding downward

at present. It is not clear how much the media might be affecting this, but

it clearly is a top-down process. There is always SOME movement BOTH ways,

but I don't notice much evidence of such regularlized past participles as

 have went  or unchanged preterits as  He come yesterday  making any gains on

the social scale.

    I am worried that one of my own most cherished pronunciations, in

which  pin = pen , may be slipping, but I am not sure whether it is more due

to media influence or Yankee colonization of the South. In any case, the

development is not bottom-up.

    Lexicon is always most easily influenced by the media. How many people

under 30 know any other term for  cottage cheese  (unless they grew up on a

farm in Pennsylvania)? Store labeling plus advertising has made this the

uniform term.

        --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



Date:  Thu, 25 Nov 1993 05:33:03 -0600

From:  Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



 I'm really interested in all the responses, since I looked for citations for my

 dissertation from linguists refuting the myth that television would lead to

 homogeneity in Am. Eng. and it was hard to find this discussion in print

 anywhere.



I also have looked in vain for print discussion of this topic. I was looking

for it because somebody once asked me what evidence I had for my casual

comment that television and radio have not affected dialectal diversity in

the U.S. -- *except in lexicon*. I finally had to give up and reply that

the lack of evidence that there has been such influence leads us to believe

that there hasn't been.



Although I've never dealt with this topic in any work I was doing for

publication, I've mentioned it from time to time in teaching or in

general conversation and have pointed out that our speech does not seem

to be affected very much by listening to somebody on television or radio --

that interaction is required for such influence to occur (except in lexicon).

I don't know why I "know" this, however, and will appreciate the help if

anybody can tell me why I think I know it.



I've always said "except in lexicon" because it has always seemed common

sensical to me that the media do influence lexicon.

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



------------------------------



Date:  Thu, 25 Nov 1993 05:36:41 -0600

From:  Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



  Is there anybody who doesn't know who Barney is?



I didn't know who Barney was until a discussion of him on WORDS-L a month

or two ago.

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



------------------------------



Date:  Thu, 25 Nov 1993 10:57:32 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



Do computer conferences become part of the media?

                --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 24 Nov 1993 to 25 Nov 1993

************************************************



There are 2 messages totalling 85 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. diversity of accents (2)



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Fri, 26 Nov 1993 16:57:50 CST

From:  salikoko mufwene  mufw[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MIDWAY.UCHICAGO.EDU 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



Natalie:

 Based on my field work on Gullah, it seems to me that the media,

especially TV or radio, help people develop additional competence (sometimes

passive only) in other varieties without compelling them to speak this/these

other way(s). What I often noticed among Gullah speakers was that they would

turn to each other in the middle of a program on TV and comment on it in

Gullah. Occasionally they would imitate something in the other variety, as

if to quote it, and then burst into a laughter. I have found

ethnographically naive, if I may use strong language, most of the claims

of language change attributed to media. To paraphrase strongly a statement

in the conclusion of my contribution to the EMERGENCE OF BLACK ENGLISH, it is

almost as if linguistic features could spread, like germs of cold or the

flu, without intimate interaction. When some linguists claim that speakers

of nonstandard varieties imitate educated speech, they just do not realize

that sometimes speakers of nonstandard varieties ridicule educated speech among

themselves! One thing several of us have confused is 'wanting to be treated

equal' with 'wanting to be the same'.

 Incidentally, a more elaborate discussion of reasons why Gullah may not be

decreolizing was published in my article "Some reasons why Gullah is not

dying yet" in ENGLISH WORLD-WIDE 12.221-243 (1991). An earlier discussion,

which compared the situation with Southern English, was published in my

review article on LANGUAGE VARIETY IN THE SOUTH (ed. by Montgomery and

Bailey) published in the J. OF PIDGIN AND CREOLE LANGUAGES 2.93-110 (1987).

Salikoko S. Mufwene

Linguistics, U. of Chicago

s-mufwene[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uchicago.edu

312-702-8531



------------------------------



Date:  Fri, 26 Nov 1993 18:45:00 EST

From:  "Dennis.Preston"  22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.BITNET 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



Now that I have seen Rudy Troike's and Ellen Johnson's responses to some of my

complaints about the news article on the decline of diversity in US dialects,

I am inclined even more to stick to my original claims.

First, Troike's example of the z --  d/__n (e.g. business becomes bidness)

reversal is pretty obviously correction from above (not change from above). I

believe that the motivations and social history for slapping something down is

significantly different from real change from above.

Second, I welcome Ellen Johnson's comments on her dissertation, for, of

course, the rest of it know it only from her numerous presentations of parts

of it. I am happy to concede that in reinvestigations of dialect

differentiation region as a variable may play a smaller role; my comment,

however, pointed towards total variation, which, I believe, is more or less

the same. Granted, that newer variation may be attributed to ethnicity,

gender, age, rurality, and the like, but I suspect that we must take dialect

in that more general sense if we are to speak productively about variation in

North America.

(Those who dislike my ignoring of the dia- of dialect may try to correct it

from above.)

Of course advertising and media have influenced deteriorating variation in the

dragonfly and cottage cheese sets, and such influences are important and worth

studying. They are not, howeever, exactly the backbone of variationist work in

the US over the last three decades or so.

Finally, and most importantly, I originally responded to the news story

becuase I was angry as hell at the way it went off (not, as some interpreted

it, at the accuracy or inaccuracy of the report).

Let's try another scenario. Suppose a paper in Detroit called me and asked for

some neurolinguistic comment. Since I am generally ignorant, suppose I went to

LINGUIST/L and asked in general for some comments, copied them with no request

for expert screeing and handed them over to a journalist to pick and choose

from. Unless I misunderstand, that's what happened here. I believe the

so-called more scientific community of neurolinguists would be outraged. I

believe those of us who study variation professionally have every right to be

similarly outraged. Progress in the last three decades and the centrality of

variation studies to the most important issues of general linguistics have

removed our subdiscipline rather far from the cocktail-party linguistics

status in which it was once held. The information which reached the paper was,

in my opinion, not much better than popular or common-sense stuff; it did not

reflect professional work at all. I am happy to discuss with colleagues the

details of change from above and media influence which haveensued from this

event, but I was more than a little unhappy to have the serious study of

variation misrepresented once again. Let't try to be a little more

professionally courteous to one another's sub-interests.

Dennis Preston

 22709mgr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]msu.bitnet 



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 25 Nov 1993 to 26 Nov 1993

************************************************



There are 2 messages totalling 70 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. diversity of accents (2)



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Sat, 27 Nov 1993 12:19:49 -0600

From:  Tim Frazer  mftcf[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UXA.ECN.BGU.EDU 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



I just logged onto the system and landed in the middle of this

discussion, so I missed some things. Dennis, could you or someone else

please cite for me the newspaper article which treats "decline of dialects"?

Or enter it, better yet, on the system so I can print it off? I also get

angry at journalists who print crap like this, but wehave to remember

that the very journalists who perpetuate this myth are part of a

cultural superstructure which has existed for more than a century. It is

so common that most literatre people take it for granted. It is the

result of a regional group which established economic and cultural hegemony

after the Civil War and which has dominated higher education and

publishing since. For this reason, Inland Northern dominates textbooks,

pronunciation guides (e.g, the NBC Handbook of pronunciation) and many

dictionaries. Rudy: I have on my desk a primary school textbook called

IMPROVINMG YOUR LANGUAGE. It dates from 1951. It has this entry:

say: pen

make it rhyme with: Ben

Do not say: pin



This book does the same for GET, TEN, etc.



I have a long discussion of this in my book, out this week, HEARTLAND

ENGLISH; the intorduction touches on journalistic myths and chapter 4

touches on Yankee domination. See also chapters by Preston, Donahue,

Sledd, and Riney.



On TV influence: somewhere I have read about a deaf-and-dumb couple who

gave birth to two normal children. They decided the kids would learn to

talk "normally" by watching lots of TV. By kindergarten they had not

learned to talk. I would guess from this that language learning is

an interactional process (and so is dialect acquisition); watching TV is

not interaction.



--Tim Frazer



------------------------------



Date:  Sat, 27 Nov 1993 15:43:41 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



Tim--

    Thanks for the pin:pen item. In the late '60s we got the state of Texas

textbook adoption process (thanks to Mary Galvan) to require that all English

texts recognize the validity of regional variants, and many publishers complied

but linguists in NCTE and elsewhere have lost the impact that Marckwardt and

Allen and McDavid were having at that time, and textbooks have seriously

backslid. So if journalists are ignorant, the problem really starts with

uninformed English teachers. I don't know what to do about it, but I find the

state of ignorance today compared to 20 years ago depressing. We can't blame

it all on the Reagan administration, but it will continue to regress unless we

figure out something to do about the situation.

    The news on your book was good to hear: can you give everyone on the

network the full bibliographic information and price? It could be useful as

a text.

    On TV and basic language acquisition: If you find the reference, it

would be interesting to have. Some years ago a Spanish monolingual child in

Austin was left alone with the TV as a baby-sitter while both the parents

worked, and when the girl started school, she did not know a word of English

except apparently to identify it as "background noise". For six weeks she

wandered around the classroom and paid no attention to the teacher. Only when

a student of mine who was bilingual (Caroline Willard) sat her down and clued

her in and gave her some English vocabulary did she begin to pay attention.

                --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 26 Nov 1993 to 27 Nov 1993

************************************************



There are 9 messages totalling 185 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. diversity of accents (2)

 2. diversity of accents revisited

 3. Mail Order / Pin-Pen / LAGS (4)

 4. egg-aig (2)



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 13:38:09 -0500

From:  "J. Chambers"  chambers[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]EPAS.UTORONTO.CA 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



Regarding Tim Frazer's & Rudy Troike's recollections of the hearing

children of deaf parents who couldn't learn English by watching

television, the only written reference I know is Susan Ervin-Tripp

(1973) "Some strategies for the first two years," in Timothy Moore,

ed., Cognition and the Acquisition of Language. NY: Academic Press. 261-86.



I cite Ervin-Tripp with some others as evidence that mass media do NOT

affect speech in any significant way. Although there is a widespread

popular belief that the mass media are highly influential

linguistically, they seem completely uninfluential apart from the most

superficial level, namely the dissemination of lexical items.

(Yabba-dabba-doo!)



This discussion is in "Sociolinguistic dialectology", my chapter in

Dennis Preston's new ADS centennial vol., American Dialect Research,

published by Benjamins.

                    Jack Chambers













                    This discussion is part of "Sociolinguistic dialectology,



------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 14:06:07 -0500

From:  "J. Chambers"  chambers[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]EPAS.UTORONTO.CA 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents revisited



I just sent a message to you ADS networkers in response to Tim Frazer

& Rudy Troike, who were at the top of my message list (i.e., the most

recent) when I signed on. Then, as I worked my way down (temporally as

well as list-wise) I discovered that my message should have been more

general because Natalie and others have been looking in vain for a

discussion in print on the issue. So I am pleased to say that my

chapter in Dennis's ADS centennial vol. includes that discussion on

pp. 138-40 (plus cross refs to other parts of that chapter). As far as

I know, it is the only discussion so directly on that topic--or so

generally. But I cite a couple of articles (Ervin-Tripp, Labov,

perhaps some others) that impinge upon it. I look at my e-mail about

once a week on average, and I often wish it accumulated with the

oldest at the top, so I could follow the chronology without having to

reconstruct it.     --Jack



------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 13:38:42 -0600

From:  Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject: Mail Order / Pin-Pen / LAGS



  I look at my e-mail about

  once a week on average, and I often wish it accumulated with the

  oldest at the top, so I could follow the chronology without having to

  reconstruct it.     --Jack



I bet you can change it to accumulate that way. Oldest-at-top is, I

think, a much more usual method than the way yours works.



Speaking of old mail, I remembered while driving to Alabama the other

day that I had not replied to a list posting I had read hurriedly and

meant to reply to later -- the one from Rudy expressing fear that his

"pen" and "pin" were beginning to separate. I also have noticed lately

a strange vowel sound creeping into my pronunciation of words like "pen"

and "ten." I don't know what's causing it but do find it distressing.

God intended "pen" and "pin" to be homophonous.



On still another topic, do any of you know the latest price and ordering

info for LAGS? I'm about to fight one more time for our library to order

it. Since I've let a couple of years go by since my last attempt, I've

forgotten the ordering info.

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 13:11:24 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Mail Order / Pin-Pen / LAGS



Natalie--

    I sympathize re the emergence of an alien /e/ in  pen , etc. Once

when I was teaching ESL in an intensive program, surrounded by /en/-users

(and /hw/-users), I was distressed to find both /en/ and /hw/ creeping into

my speech unbidden. It really took some effort to repress them. The latter

tends to recur whenever I am doing phonology in an English linguistic class,

and model the  which : witch  contrast. As an interesting indication that

I use spelling clues to determine whether a vowel is /In/ or /en/ in foreign

varieties (I follow McDavid in trying to avoid the confusing term "dialect"),

it took me years to find out that "others" use an /e/ in  friend .

    Hope y'all out there (=Natalie and everyone else on-line) had a good

Thanksgiving.

        --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 14:07:31 -0600

From:  Tim Frazer  mftcf[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UXA.ECN.BGU.EDU 

Subject: Re: diversity of accents



Dear Rudy,



The book is available from University of Alabama Press for $27.95.

HEARTLAND ENGLISH, ed. Timothy C. Frazer, 1993.



We require all teacher ed. majors (at WIU) to take an English language

course which is 1/4 history of the language and 3/4 sociolinguistics.

I hope it addresses some of the problems you were talking about.



-- Tim Frazer



------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 14:16:00 CDT

From:  Beth Lee Simon  BLSIMON[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MACC.WISC.EDU 

Subject: egg-aig



Oh Rudy, Natalie,

    Same difference here. The first year I taught in Wisconsin,

we all went around the room and said the word "egg". And my initial

was quite lovely, quite different from most of the others. Not any more.

And I don't even want to talk about what's happened to my vowel in

"milk".



beth

simon



------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 14:30:37 -0600

From:  Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject: Re: Mail Order / Pin-Pen / LAGS



  (and /hw/-users), I was distressed to find both /en/ and /hw/ creeping into

  my speech unbidden. It really took some effort to repress them. The latter

  tends to recur whenever I am doing phonology in an English linguistic class,

  and model the  which : witch  contrast. As an interesting indication that



Odd though it may be, I've always had /hw/. But I've certainly never had

the /En/:/In/ contrast -- or at least not until these very recent vocalic

oddities I've noticed.



I think I've probably told before about how for several years when I first

started teaching linguistics courses I gave "then" and "thin" as a useful

minimal pair in helping the students hear voiced/voiceless th. Suddenly

it dawned on me one day that that wouldn't work for everybody -- although

it did, of course, work for most of my students.

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 14:25:47 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: egg-aig



Beth,

    My sympathies. I remember when my sister spent a year going to high

school in Avon, Illinois, and came back rhyming  hill  and  hell ! Oh,

Ellinois!

    --Rudy



------------------------------



Date:  Sun, 28 Nov 1993 14:33:53 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Mail Order / Pin-Pen / LAGS



Natalie--

    I've certainly done the same thing.  then  and  thin  are a minimal

pair, aren't they? I also used to confidently give  singer  and  finger  as

near-minimal pairs, until I once had a student from Long Island!

    It reminds me of the ESL teacher who was once dutifully drilling the

 cot : caught  contrast because it was in the book, and then came in to

complain to me that the students couldn't hear the difference. When I asked her

to pronounce the words, of course she did not have it. For students who are

linguistically disadvantaged in this way, it is a great object lesson in th e

nature of phonemic contrasts.

        --Rudy



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 27 Nov 1993 to 28 Nov 1993

************************************************



There are 12 messages totalling 501 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. egg-aig, and dialect diversity

 2. Rock'n Roll (2)

 3. egg-aig, and dialect diversi

 4. Georgetown University Round Table 1994

 5. th/dh (5)

 6. Language variation

 7. "Rock 'n Roll"



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 08:45:28 -0500

From:  "William A. Kretzschmar, Jr."  billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ATLAS.UGA.EDU 

Subject: Re: egg-aig, and dialect diversity



For all afficionados of Wisconsin English out there, the

front-vowel-raising-before-velar phenomenon has gotten some nice work from

Christine Zeller at Penn. She gave an NWAVE paper on it



Dennis, did your Thanksgiving turkey disagree with you? Why is it a bad

thing to try to cooperate with a journalist? If Cathy didn't get the

response you would have preferred when she queried the net, or if the

journalist didn't draw the conclusion you prefer, why is that her fault?

I think she acted in good faith and doesn't deserve a charge of

uncollegiality.



I think we need to question the assertion that some unspecified "media" is

good at causing lexical change. Sure, some words get spread (or even

initiated) by the media, but I am not sure that that is responsible for

change in the existing lexicon, for loss or addition of everyday words.

When was the last time you heard Tom Brokaw talk about cottage cheese and

dragonflies? Ellen Johnson's diss. suggests that there is more variation

than ever among such everyday words, though less of it than 50 years ago

can be attributed (with statistical significance) to the categories we can

track for LAMSAS (region, age, education, biological sex, race,

urban/rural residence). Collapse of some word sets, like cottage cheese,

is better attributed to a commercial term and cultural change (nobody

makes c.c. except big dairies) or genetics and cultural change

(development of stringless green beans) or progress and cultural change

(loss of need for whiffletrees). Other word sets may well have been

increased by the rise of public education, such as spread through reading

of familiarity with standard terms like dragonfly or with out-of-region

variants like seed/pit/stone to accompany local variants; this increase

is a nice counterpoint to the homogenizing loss through education of

nonstandard verb forms. Ellen's dissertation gives the first really good

(i.e. 50-year real-time) evidence for talking about these things, though I

think it can hardly be expected to answer all of the questions the

evidence raises.



******************************************************************************

Bill Kretzschmar Phone: 706-542-2246 Dept. of English FAX: 706-542-2181

University of Georgia Internet: billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hyde.park.uga.edu Athens, GA

30602-6205 Bitnet: wakjengl[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 11:46:50 -0500

From:  chi-wen  WANG[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UTKVX.BITNET 

Subject: Rock'n Roll



Hello,



    I am an international student at UT and have been in the United

States for one and a half years. Since American English is not my native

tongue, I can not understand quite well some words American people use in their

daily life. For example, one guy on my class project team always says,

"Rock'n roll!" It seems that he uses this phrase whenever he thinks

something is great or right. Could anybody out there tell me what he

really means? Does this phrase have something to do with the Rock & Roll

Music? Where does it come from? Any comments would be appreciated.



Sheila Wang

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Department of Advertising

E-Mail: wang[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]utkvx.utk.edu



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 12:01:00 EST

From:  "Dennis.Preston"  22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.BITNET 

Subject: Re: egg-aig, and dialect diversi



Bill,

My turkey was OK, but I still do not think that the way to inform the media in

the case of technical information is by collecting random responses from a

network (even if it professionally oriented) and let the journalist take pot

luck at the responses.

On the other matters, I agree with you entirely. I doubt if even in such cases

as the dragonfly and cottage cheese sets we are dealing with real media

influence, and your clarification of some of what Ellen Dissertation shows

backs my earlier claim (I believe) that there is nearly as much variation out

there now as there was 50 yers ago (albeit, of course, in different areas of

the vocabulary and constrained by factors other than regionalism).

Turkey leftovers tonight.

Best,

Dennis

(Damn! Forgot if this is to you are the whole network. Sending it anyhow since

it contains no dirty laundry I can remember.)



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 16:06:37 -0500

From:  GURT[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GUVAX.BITNET

Subject: Georgetown University Round Table 1994



         Preliminary Announcement  *  Please Post



            Georgetown University Round Table

            on Languages and Linguistics 1994



               March 13 - 16, 1994



          Educational Linguistics, Cross-Cultural

          Communication, and Global Interdependence



            Chaired by James E. Alatis, Dean

           School of Languages and Linguistics

          Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.





                Plenary Speakers



         Douglas Brown, San Francisco State University

           Braj Kachru, University of Illinois

       Stephen Krashen, University of Southern California

            Tom McArthur, Oxford University

        Jack C. Richards, City Polytechnic of Hong Kong

           Bernard Spolsky, Bar-Ilan University

           Deborah Tannen, Georgetown University





                Invited Speakers



     Ayo Bamgbose, University of Ibadan and University of Illinois

            Leslie Beebe, Columbia University

          Eyamba G. Bokamba, University of Illinois

       Jerry Cline-Bailey, Xavier University (Cincinnati)

        Nadine O'Connor Di Vito, University of Chicago

        Donald Freeman, School for International Training

         Rebecca Freeman, University of Pennsylvania

      Celeste Kinginger, University of Maryland at College Park

           Ronald Leow, Georgetown University

      Leo van Lier, Monterey Institute of International Studies

       Yu-Hwei Lii-Shih, National Taiwan Normal University

           Joan Morley, University of Michigan

         Anne Pakir, National University of Singapore

          Teresa Pica, University of Pennsylvania

    Ren Shaozeng, Hangzhou University (People's Republic of China)

         Elana Shohamy, Tel Aviv University (Israel)

      Larry E. Smith, East-West Center, University of Hawaii

    Zhuang Gen-Yuan, Hangzhou University (People's Republic of China)





           For more information, please contact

          Joan C. Cook, Coordinator  *  GURT 1994

    Georgetown University  *  School of Languages and Linguistics

      303 Intercultural Center  *  Washington, DC 20057-1067

      e-mail: gurt[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.bitnet  *  gurt[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu

         voice: 202/687-5726  *  fax: 202/687-5712









           Presessions: March 11 and 12, 1994



The presessions will be held in the Intercultural Center. Please contact the

individual organizers for more information.



African Linguistics V (Saturday morning)

Rev. Solomon Sara, S.J., organizer

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-5956 or ssara[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



Arabic Dialect Teaching Workshop (Friday)

Karin Ryding, Ph.D., and Margaret Nydell, co-organizers

Department of Arabic

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1082

202/687-5646 or rydingk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvm.bitnet



Colloquium on Academic Listening Across Language-Culture Areas (Saturday)

Abelle Mason, organizer

Department of English as a Foreign Language

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1083

202/687-5978



Community Interpreting (Friday)

Margareta Bowen, Ph.D., and Monika Gehrke, co-organizers

Division of Interpretation and Translation

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-0993

202/687-5848



History of Linguistics (Saturday)

Rev. Francis P. Dinneen, S.J., organizer

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-5812



Hypermedia Environments Open House (Friday)

Jackie Tanner, organizer

Language Learning Technology

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-0984

202/687-5766 or jtanner[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



Issues in Greek Linguistics (Saturday)

James E. Alatis, Ph.D., and Pavlos Pavlou, co-organizers

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-5956 or pavlos[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



Issues in Slavic Linguistics (Friday and Saturday)

Cynthia Vakareliyska, Ph.D., organizer

Department of Russian

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-0990

202/687-6108



Issues in Teaching ASL as a Second Language (Saturday)

Jeff Connor-Linton, Ph.D., Ceil Lucas, Ph.D., and Clayton Valli, Ph.D.,

   co-organizers

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-6156 or clucas[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]gallua.gallaudet.edu



Pragmatics in ASL and English (Friday)

Catherine Ball, Ph.D., and Clare Wolfowitz, Ph.D., co-organizers

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-5949 or cball[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



Problems in Portuguese Linguistics (Saturday)

Clea Rameh, Ph.D., organizer

Department of Portuguese

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-0991

202/687-6120



Special Student Session

Discourse Analysis: Works in Progress (Sunday)

Elif Tolga Rosenfeld and Scott Kiesling, co-organizers

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-5956 or rosenfeld[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu





Fees:



Full conference (five days, including presessions):

Professional         $100.00

Students           $ 50.00

Retired            $ 50.00



Presessions only       $ 20.00

Sunday or Wednesday only   $ 40.00

Monday or Tuesday only    $ 55.00



G.U. Students         $ 10.00

(Waived for 5 hours or more of volunteer work)

G.U. Faculty/Staff       waived







          Preconference Tutorials: March 13, 1994



The preconference tutorials will be held in the Intercultural Center at

Georgetown University on Sunday, March 13. Tuition is $75.00 per tutorial.

Please contact the individual organizers for more information.



Concordances and Corpora for Classroom and Research

Catherine Ball, Ph.D.

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-5812 or cball[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



Criterion-Referenced Language Test Development for Teachers and Administrators

Jeff Connor-Linton, Ph.D.

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-6156 or connorlinton[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu



Tools for Computer-Aided Analysis of Language Acquisition Data:

   Training in Use of COALA

Catherine Doughty, Ph.D.

Department of Linguistics

Georgetown University

Washington, D.C. 20057-1068

202/687-6252 or doughtyc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]guvax.georgetown.edu





To register, please print out, complete, and mail in the form below together

with your check for the appropriate amount.



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -



Registration form. Please send this form and your check (payable to

Georgetown University) to: Joan C. Cook, Coordinator, GURT 1994, School of

Languages and Linguistics, 303 Intercultural Center, Georgetown University,

Washington, D.C. 20057-1067, USA.



Registration forms must be postmarked no later than February 21, 1994. After

the deadline, add $10.00 to the fee.





So that the University may provide reasonable accommodations, we ask that you

notify the GURT 1994 Coordinator of any disability as soon as possible.

Because of the need to schedule sign language interpreters in advance, please

request interpreters no later than February 28. Any information you provide

will be treated confidentially:



______________________________________________________________________________



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Professional Affiliation: ____________________________________________________



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City: ________________________________________________________________________



State/Province, Country: _____________________________________________________



Postal code: _________________________________________________________________





Fees. Please circle the category you're registering for:



Full conference (five days, including presessions):

Professional         $100.00

Students           $ 50.00

Retired            $ 50.00



Presessions only       $ 20.00

Sunday or Wednesday only   $ 40.00

Monday or Tuesday only    $ 55.00



G.U. Students         $ 10.00 (Waived for 5 hours of volunteer work)

G.U. Faculty/Staff       waived



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 19:48:28 -0600

From:  Tim Frazer  mftcf[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UXA.ECN.BGU.EDU 

Subject: Re: Rock'n Roll



On Mon, 29 Nov 1993, chi-wen wrote:



  Hello,

 

      I am an international student at UT and have been in the United

  States for one and a half years. Since American English is not my native

  tongue, I can not understand quite well some words American people use in thei

  daily life. For example, one guy on my class project team always says,

  "Rock'n roll!" It seems that he uses this phrase whenever he thinks

  something is great or right. Could anybody out there tell me what he

  really means? Does this phrase have something to do with the Rock & Roll

  Music? Where does it come from? Any comments would be appreciated.

 

  Sheila Wang

  University of Tennessee, Knoxville

  Department of Advertising

  E-Mail: wang[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]utkvx.utk.edu

 

Is he saying "right on?"



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 17:57:27 -0800

From:  Donald Livingston  deljr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]U.WASHINGTON.EDU 

Subject: Re: th/dh



I'm amazed. In my ignorance I hadn't realized that there was any

dialect of English where we actually had minimal pairs distinguished by

the voiced/voiceless interdental fricatives. I have a request for any

speakers out there who do distinguish pin-pen: please post any

minimal pairs you have noted in your variety of English that

show that voiced/voiceless interdental fricative distinction. I have

failed to come up with any for my own pin/pen distinguishing dialect.



All the best, Don.



-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Don Livingston             (Graduate Student)

4500 Whitman Ave. North #2       Dept. Slav. Lang. & Lit., DP-32

Seattle, WA 98103            University of Washington

Phone/Fax (206) 634-1539        Seattle, WA 98195



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 18:11:29 -0800

From:  Donald Livingston  deljr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]U.WASHINGTON.EDU 

Subject: Re: Language variation



  Granted that the article that appeared in The Washington Post was

embarassing by educated standards. As one of those quoted, I imagine I

might have the right to be embarassed or offended. But take a look at the

article immediately preceding the one under discusiion (it's in the

Why_Things_Are section):



  "Why do objects appear smaller the farther we move from them?"



   Some nerds will tell you that the apparent size of objects is a

function of straight-line geometry ... But ignore all that. These are

the '90s, an age of heroic action and positive thinking. The new rule

is, when objects recede they don't get smaller -- YOU GET BIGGER.







Though people will, doubtlessly, take the regional accent section more

seriously, I somehow can't find it in my heart to be too horrified,

embarassed, or offended.



All the best, Don.



-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Don Livingston             (Graduate Student)

4500 Whitman Ave. North #2       Dept. Slav. Lang. & Lit., DP-32

Seattle, WA 98103            University of Washington

Phone/Fax (206) 634-1539        Seattle, WA 98195



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 21:26:06 EST

From:  Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject: Re: th/dh



There's thigh/thy, and (although it's a bit of a stretch to call it a minimal

pair) thistle/this'll.  Also, for the relevant vocalic dialect, ether/either.



Larry Horn



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 20:38:32 -0600

From:  Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject: Re: th/dh



  I'm amazed. In my ignorance I hadn't realized that there was any

  dialect of English where we actually had minimal pairs distinguished by

  the voiced/voiceless interdental fricatives. I have a request for any



either/ether

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 23:09:18 EST

From:  Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject: Re: th/dh



Besides the few we've been discussing, I forgot to mention the pattern of

adjectives and nouns with final -th that alternate with verbs with final -dh

(spelled -the):

  mouth vs. mouthe

  loath vs. loathe

  wreath vs. wreathe

There are probably other pairs that participate in this pattern, in some cases

subject to dialectal and idiolectal variation, considering how marginal some

of these lexical items are. (Other potential pairs are of course wrecked by

the vowel shift: bath/bathe, breath/breathe,...)

  In any case, the situation with th/dh pairs is a lot more robust that what

we find with sh/zh (voiceless/voiced palatal fricatives). The best I've ever

come up with here is Confucian/confusion, while other would-be pairs involve

either proper names invoked for the occasion (Asher/azure), marginal instances

of productive word-formation (mesher/measure), or near-minimal pairs that

don't quite get there (pressure/pleasure, thresher/treasure). Can anybody do

better?

                    Larry Horn



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 21:27:29 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: th/dh



See the advantage of merging |IN| and |EN| (diaphonemic representation)?

                --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 23:35:35 EST

From:  Erick Byrd  EBYRD[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA.CC.UGA.EDU 

Subject: "Rock 'n Roll"



Hello, Sheila:

Regarding your question about your colleague's random expression,

"Rock 'n Roll!", I'd like to offer the following: I think what he is

indicating is a level of interest or excitement about whatever the

immediate topic of conversation is, or else a desire to get started with the

project at hand. He is telling everyone around that he is of a positive

attitude, and feels good about the topic which has precipitated his remark.

Rock 'n roll music is, by nature, a "letting go" of all inhibition, which

your classmate is also exhibiting. There's more, but it only serves to

underscore or amplify what I think I have already expressed.

Sincerely, Erick Byrd



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 28 Nov 1993 to 29 Nov 1993

************************************************





There are 27 messages totalling 493 lines in this issue.



Topics of the day:



 1. th/dh (6)

 2. "Rock 'n Roll"

 3. egg-aig

 4. Rock'n Roll

 5. Half Past the Hour (10)

 6. song

 7. sh/zh

 8. Quarter to/till/of the Hour

 9. noon and points around it (2)

 10. quarter of

 11. loss of dialect distinctiveness

 12. rock n roll



----------------------------------------------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 23:38:57 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: th/dh



    On vl/vd  th  contrast, for some people, the genitive singular vs

plural of a few words work: mouth's - mouths, death's - deaths; more general:

wreath's - wreaths

    Which reminds me, has anyone been noticing the demise of the vl/vd

singular:plural contrast in  house : houses ? I suspect it comes in part

because there is no orthographic reinforcement, as in  wolf : wolves . I

notice it mostly in Northeasterners, having first encountered it in a New

Yorker. Maybe it is an immigrant substratum effect, at least in origin.

        --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 23:55:57 -0700

From:  Rudy Troike  RTROIKE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ARIZVMS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: "Rock 'n Roll"



Sheila--

    I'd suggest you ask your classmate what he means by the expression.

One advantage a non-native speaker has is being able to ask about terms and

expressions without being thought stupid, because it is recognized by the

native that you are not familiar with the culture. In many ways it is harder

for a native to ask, especially about something that might seem self-obvious.

Try it, and let us know what you find out. Maybe, as Eric Byrd suggests, it is

just an emotive expression, and not really easily definable, even by the person

who is using it (people often have trouble defining words, because it is not

really an everyday requirement for sociolinguistic competence; my favorite

demonstration term is  thing , which is essentially undefinable -- the most

ordinary words are often the most indefinable). [NB: the usual answer is "an

object"; so what is an object? Something tangible. But what is tangible? ...

Something you can touch. But what is  some*thing* ? Anything....]

    You can try it with  dongxi . Zai jian,

            --Rudy Troike



------------------------------



Date:  Mon, 29 Nov 1993 22:57:06 -0800

From:  "Thomas L. Clark"  tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]NEVADA.EDU 

Subject: Re: egg-aig



Your message dated: Sun, 28 Nov 1993 14:25:47 -0700

--------

  Beth,

      My sympathies. I remember when my sister spent a year going to high

  school in Avon, Illinois, and came back rhyming  hill  and  hell ! Oh,

  Ellinois!

      --Rudy



Everbuddy knows that  hell  is those little white frozen things that

fall from the sky, sorta like snow, only harder.





-------------------------------------------------------

Thomas L. Clark English Department UNLV 89154

tlc[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]nevada.edu



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 06:43:53 +0500

From:  "Connie C. Eble"  cceble[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]GIBBS.OIT.UNC.EDU 

Subject: Re: Rock'n Roll



  I think that you figured out from context just exactly what rock 'n'

roll means to your classmate--that he thinks something is good or great.

This example is probably a specimen of the slang of your classmate's

group. I think that I have the expression in my corpus of college slang

from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but I do not have my

files at hand to check it now. As for the origin of the phrase as a term

referring to music (which the originator of rock'n'roll as a slang

expression for great probably had in mind), Gerald Cohen has a excellent

piece in Comments on Etymology, I think in the December issue of 1992, or

somewhere around that time.

  Do you know Jonathan Lighter in the English Department at the

University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He is completing a dictionary of

slang and might have some information for you.



      Connie Eble  cceble[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]gibbs.oit.unc.edu



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 07:50:00 EST

From:  "Dennis.Preston"  22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.BITNET 

Subject: Re: th/dh



How about  thy  and  thigh  for starters (although it may not be fair for me t

o play this game since I am a  pin   pen  conflater.

Dennis Preston



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 07:55:00 EST

From:  "Dennis.Preston"  22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.BITNET 

Subject: Re: th/dh



Larry,

In some radical stress-fronting dialects of the US South  assure  and  azure 

would fit your needs. Still a stretch, huh?

Dennis Preston



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 07:59:00 EST

From:  "Dennis.Preston"  22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.BITNET 

Subject: Re: th/dh



Rudy,

The loss of voice in  houses  is strong in the Great Lakes area as well, and

precisely in areas with strong Scandanavian, German, Dutch influence.

Dennis Preston



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 07:09:47 -0600

From:  Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject: Half Past the Hour



Is there a regional distribution for "half past" as in "half past three"?

I had never really thought about it until a recent discussion on WORDS-L,

in which I am almost alone in saying that I have never used the expression

and think of it as more British than American. The only other person on

the list who says she finds "three-thirty" much more "normal" sounding than

"half past three" is a Texan, although another Texan claims that "half past"

is quite common.

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 08:58:25 EST

From:  Larry Horn  LHORN[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



The above was perfectly colloquial, and indeed represented the normal way to

denote e.g. 3:30, for me as a young native New Yorker and still does. I had no

idea that it's outside anyone's dialect area (within English, that is!).

Introspecting, though, I probably do tend to avoid using it with children (my

own or others), and I would predict that it might tend to disappear as digital

timepieces become more and more standard.

                          Larry



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 10:31:38 EST

From:  "Beverly S. Hartford"  HARTFORD[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UCS.INDIANA.EDU 

Subject: Re: th/dh



Rudy: Those of us who are REALLY northeasterners (e.g. north of Vermont)

don't think of New Yorkers as such. You'll be happy to know that I

at least keep the vl/vd contrast in your example, but then I've

been contaminated by living in the southwest and midwest. However,

I have not noticed it changing in southern Maine, at least, where

there would be minimal immigrant substratum effect. Bev Hartford



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 09:02:36 -0500

From:  "William A. Kretzschmar, Jr."  billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ATLAS.UGA.EDU 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



In the LAMSAS data, _half after_ occurs in only 82 of 483 communities;

_half past_ occurs in 435 of 483 communities. According to our spatial

autocorrelation statistic, neither one is significantly clustered at the

p .01 level we prefer (though p   .03 for _half after_, and its number of

occurrences is at the lower end of what is possible for the SA statistic,

so it is reasonable to say that it may well actually be clustered).

Observation of a plot of _half after_ suggests that in is Midland and

Southern, with scattered occurrences in northern urban centers and

upstate NY.



_xxx-thirty_ patterns in the LAMSAS data in South Carolina and Upstate

New York---it is a classic example of what we call a "McDavid

distribution", because Raven recorded the _xxx-thirty_ response when he

heard it but Guy Lowman didn't bother to write it down.



That's the facts, Natalie, from the 1930s and 40s.

******************************************************************************

Bill Kretzschmar         Phone:  706-542-2246

Dept. of English         FAX:   706-542-2181

University of Georgia      Internet: billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hyde.park.uga.edu

Athens, GA 30602-6205      Bitnet:  wakjengl[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 10:35:45 CST

From:  Dennis Baron  debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UIUC.EDU 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



In Message Tue, 30 Nov 1993 07:09:47 -0600,

 Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU  writes:



 Is there a regional distribution for "half past" as in "half past three"?

 



Natalie,



Half past is how I always said it before I got my digital watch.

Grew up in NYC in the 1940s-60s.



Dennis (not dInnis)

--



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 10:42:46 EST

From:  "Beverly S. Hartford"  HARTFORD[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UCS.INDIANA.EDU 

Subject: Re: song



Yeah, but we call it a Northeaster! Bev Hartford (a native Mainer)



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 11:52:00 EST

From:  "Charles M. Rosenberg"  BORSO[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]IRISHMVS.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



I was born and raised in and near Chicago and went to college

near Philadelphia. To my ear three-thirty is the norm, though

I have heard half-past three as well.

Charles M. Rosenberg, University of Notre Dame



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 11:35:10 CST

From:  Mike Picone  MPICONE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UA1VM.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



One element that is missing so far in the `half past' discussion and that

will contribute to its survival even if at a very low incidence is the

fact that `XXX-thirty' cannot be used with expressions such as `midnight'

and `noon' whereas `half past' can (at least according to my speech

habits, which were established primarily in the Chicago area).



Mike Picone

U Alabama



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 10:19:02 -0400

From:  "Terry Pratt, UPEI"  TPRATT[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UPEI.CA 

Subject: Re: th/dh



thy thigh is absolutely a minimal pair for me.

They look better in pairs anyway.

Terry Pratt Ontario and Prince Edward Island



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 14:27:02 -0230

From:  "Philip Hiscock,

     MUN Folklore & Language Archive"  philiph[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]KEAN.UCS.MUN.CA 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



I grew up in St John's, Newfoundland where I always said "ha' past"

(no [f] in normal speech). We had a teasing rhyme for people who

were annoyingly asking for the time:

    Ha' past, kiss me ass,

    Quarter to me hole.

By the way, even now - in my forties - I have no idea what

people mean when they say "It's quarter of four" - does that

mean quarter _to_ or quarter _after_ the hour?

And are those "quarter" times associated with the half times - that is,

do such people as Natalie, to whom "half past" is foreign, find the

"quarter of/to/after" times foreign, too?

            -Philip Hiscock

philiph[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]kean.ucs.mun.ca



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 12:15:11 CST

From:  Mike Picone  MPICONE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UA1VM.BITNET 

Subject: sh/zh



   In any case, the situation with th/dh pairs is a lot more robust that what

 we find with sh/zh (voiceless/voiced palatal fricatives). The best I've ever

 come up with here is Confucian/confusion, while other would-be pairs involve

 either proper names invoked for the occasion (Asher/azure), marginal instances

 of productive word-formation (mesher/measure), or near-minimal pairs that

 don't quite get there (pressure/pleasure, thresher/treasure). Can anybody do

 better?

 Larry Horn



For some, like me, in normal speech _fission_ and _fishing_ would constitute

a minimal pair, as in "nuclear fission" |+voice| and "I'm goin' fishin'"

|-voice|. This will not work, of course, for those who have either the

voiceless version of _fission_ or who maintian either |i| or a word-final

velar nasal as elements of participial  -ing .



Mike Picone

U Alabama



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 13:47:07 -0500

From:  "William A. Kretzschmar, Jr."  billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ATLAS.UGA.EDU 

Subject: Re: Quarter to/till/of the Hour



For the record, LAMSAS records show that each of these three variants

occurs in about half the LAMSAS communities, and each is significantly

clustered according to the spatial autocorrelation statistic.

Observation of a plot (I can make a plot in about 60 seconds with

the LAMSASplot program I wrote, provided that we have completed the

database for the question wanted; the LAMSASplot program requires a

Mac with 13" screen, and you can have it free) _quarter till_ is a

Midland and Southern item, with heaviest concentration in West Virginia;

_quarter to_ has a rather curious distribution, with concentrations in

eastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina, but also the Inland North

and the coastal South; _quarter of_ occurs north of the Mason Dixon

line, but with many scattered occurrences in the Appalachians and Upland

South. We also have responses with "15" and "45", but I have not plotted

them.



******************************************************************************

Bill Kretzschmar         Phone:  706-542-2246

Dept. of English         FAX:   706-542-2181

University of Georgia      Internet: billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hyde.park.uga.edu

Athens, GA 30602-6205      Bitnet:  wakjengl[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]uga



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 13:59:33 EST

From:  Dan Mosser  MOSSERD[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]VTVM1.BITNET 

Subject: noon and points around it



 So "half-past noon" works for some...I find that interesting because

the other day my brother said "quarter to noon" and it struck me as odd;

when I asked him about it, he said it sounded odd to him too. So I wasn't

sure whether it might be purely a performance error, or an incipient

neomorphism, or what. Can those of you for whom "half-past noon" is

OK buy quarter-to or ten'til noon? Dan Mosser



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 12:21:25 -0600

From:  Natalie Maynor  maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]RA.MSSTATE.EDU 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



  And are those "quarter" times associated with the half times - that is,

  do such people as Natalie, to whom "half past" is foreign, find the

  "quarter of/to/after" times foreign, too?



No. I always say "quarter of." If it's not a quarter of the hour, I'm

more likely to say "till," although "of" doesn't strike me as odd. In

other words, I might say "ten of three," but I would be much more likely

to say "ten till three." I would almost certainly say "a quarter of three,"

however -- not "quarter till/to." I would never under any circumstances

say "half past" anything.



I had never thought about the problem with noon-thirty or midnight-thirty

until it was mentioned today. I guess the context has always made clear

which 12:30 I'm talking about.

  --Natalie (maynor[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ra.msstate.edu)



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 14:19:07 CST

From:  Dennis Baron  debaron[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UIUC.EDU 

Subject: quarter of



`A quarter of' is `a quarter to/till' ie, `before,' the hour. `A quarter

of 7' is not `1 3/4,' as one misguided usage "expert" once insisted. Nor

is `a quarter to' `15 minutes toward the next hour,' as another one

maintained.



The one I've always had trouble remembering was `half seven' -- is

that 6:30 or 7:30 (or is it really 3.5 after all)?



Dennis (that's d/E/nnis)

--



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 16:01:19 CST

From:  Mike Picone  MPICONE[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UA1VM.BITNET 

Subject: Re: noon and points around it



`Ten to noon' is definitely okay by me. `Quarter to noon' less so, but I think

`quarter' has less liberty in association with `noon': `quarter after noon'

for example lends to confusion. `Quarter after midnight', on the other hand,

is perfectly okay.



Mike Picone

U Alabama



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 19:34:00 EST

From:  "Dennis.Preston"  22709MGR[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]MSU.BITNET 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



A grad student of mine is currently eliciting responses to  What time is it? 

requests with an eye towards half-past and quarter to (and after). She will

also check on the respondent's timepiece configurationm (digital versus

nondigital), and she we  challenge  accuracy (e.g., What time is it exactly? I

need to set my watch?) to see what influence different time tolerances have on

the type of response. This research will be reported on next week, and I'll

try to post a summary to you. (It will not, of course, deal with regional

variation except to the extent that the responses will be all taken from young

Michiganders.)

Dennis Preston



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 20:43:31 EST

From:  David Bergdahl  bergdahl[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU 

Subject: loss of dialect distinctiveness



          Ohio University Electronic Communication





  Date: 30-Nov-1993 08:42pm EST



   To: Remote Addressee           ( _MX%"ADS-L[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UGA.CC.UGA.EDU )



  From: David Bergdahl               Dept: English

     BERGDAHL                 Tel No: (614) 593-2783



Subject: loss of dialect distinctiveness





In response to the remark about the loss of a distinctive NY-accent I offer the

following. Although I left Brooklyn in 1942 and moved to Nassau County I had an

identificable "Brooklyn" accent well into my youth. I remember in 1950--Mario

Lanza's song "Be My Love" was the big hit--at my aunt's house after church using

"Earl" for "Oil" and vice versa--my cousin Lois had a boyfriend named Oil who

worked in an earl station. But nobody at school remarked upon it. When the

great outmigration from the city started in the 1950's I was one of the

local--i.e. Long Island--kids rather than a city kid. So I know that as a kid I

had a strong dialect. Since 1958 when I went to college--and was teased by

upstate and Penn kids over my pronunciation of "coffee" &c.--I've lived outside

metropolitan NY, first in Syracuse, then Boston, then Syracuse again and for the

last 25 years SouthEast Ohio. My dialect has moderated, but Ohioans still

identify me as "eastern." Now this is a long preamble of a tale, but I had the

occasion this fall to visit my daughter Anya who's a grad student at Pratt

Institute in Brooklyn. Not only did I hear few "classic" Brooklyn accents but

my daughter's boyfriend--from LI--affirmed that the "classic" [or should I say

stereotypical?] dialect features aren't salient any more. Moreover, he couldn't

recognize my dialect as "native' to the area. Perhaps with a different ethnic make up, the "city dialect" founded on Irish, Jewish and

Italian immigrant pronunciations is already outdated. A decade ago I was told

by the English chair that the three largest ethnic groups at Queens College were Carribeans, Central

American Hispanics and Israelis. Maybe we should look to them for the new

accommodation model.



David Bergdahl Ohio University/Athens "Gateway to West Virginia"

BERGDAHL [AT SYMBOL GOES HERE] OUVAXA.CATS.OHIOU.EDU









Received: 30-Nov-1993 08:43pm



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 17:37:46 -0800

From:  Donald Livingston  deljr[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]U.WASHINGTON.EDU 

Subject: Re: Half Past the Hour



For my idiolect, "It's a quarter of four" unambiguously means 3:45.

Three variations sound fine: quarter of/to/till four. What's odd is

that although "quarter till four" sounds fine, "quarter until four"

sounds silly to me.



Usage gets strange. "Half past midnight" and "half past noon" sound

fine. But "It's a quarter after midnight/noon" sounds funny.



As Emily Litella said, "It's always something."



All the best, D. Livingston.



------------------------------



Date:  Tue, 30 Nov 1993 22:44:00 -0500

From:  chiwen[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UTKUX.UTCC.UTK.EDU

Subject: rock n roll



Hi,



    Thank you all for giving me those reponses to "rock n roll." As

Rudy Troike suggested, I called my classmate and asked him what he meant by

"rock n roll." He gave me the answer, "That's right. Let's do it." Indeed,

he expressed his positive attitude and excitement by using this slang.



    I think Erick Byrd has a good comment on this phrase. It is

interesting to know that rock n roll music indicates the feeling of "letting

go" of all inhibition. As a foreigner with different cultural background,

I did not realized this until Erick pointed it out.



Sheila Wang

wang[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]utkvx.utk.edu



------------------------------



End of ADS-L Digest - 29 Nov 1993 to 30 Nov 1993

************************************************



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