RE: "Addy and other slang" (was If you don't want people toknowyour age...)

["Dori Green" <dgreen -at- associatedbrands -dot- com>]

David B. Dubin pointed out that spoken "English" is not the same as spoken
"American".

I stand corrected.

Mr. Dubin also very accurately described a few of the regional differences
in spoken American English.  I have family in the South, and never did
figure out what in the world old great-uncle "Uncle Augie" was talking
about.  I mentioned this to my younger uncle just the other day, and it
turns out that not only did Uncle Augie mumble, he was a lecherous old coot
who had been semi-prohibited by the rest of the family from engaging the
visiting Yankee cousins in conversation so he was avoiding same.  His native
language was German and after 50 years in Charleston (most of them spent
fishing with his cronies), he spoke better outer-island Gullah (a dialect of
French, African, Spanish, and English) than he did American (Southern or
otherwise).  When he made a sincere effort, he could make himself understood
in Gichee (the city dialect of Charleston, SC).  It's possible that a
full-blooded Yankee would never have been able to understand Uncle Augie
even if there was an effort on both sides -- and Uncle Augie would never
have bothered to speak to a full-blooded Damyankee.  In 1960 the "Northern
Aggression" was still in full swing on Logan Street in Charleston.

While this regionalism is not repeated in all localities, at least not to
the degree to which it gloried in Charleston in the middle of the last
century, I'm not sure that its loss through the homogenizations of
television and population mobility is an entirely good thing.

Of course, one of the goals of technical writing is to remove any obstacles
to the clear transmittal of information, so we-all would never include
regional expressions such as y'all.

Dori Green
Technical Writer, QMS Project
Associated Brands, Inc.




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