Polling The Poll Of Polls, 2011

[koganbot]

Mark informs us, "This is the time of year when I require a POLL OF ALL THE POLLS, to diminish the absurdly extensive 'end of year' music commentary I am almost certainly never going to get round to reading."

[Poll #1813388]

Comments

[koganbot]

Assuming we're talking about the same Partridge (Eric), he seems to be more international than that: born in New Zealand, largely educated in Australia, spent most of his adult life in Britain. I have the 7th Edition of the Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Appropriately, I found it, cracked spine and all, sitting next to a dumpster. It doesn't fit in the pocket, probably not even if you're a kangaroo.

Subtitle is Colloquialisms and Catch-phrases, Solecisms and Catachreses, Nicknames, Vulgarisms, and such Americanisms as have been naturalized. This depends of course on what he means by "solecism," but his subtitle doesn't seem to take in that nonstandard dialects often follow fairly consistent rules of punctuation and pronunciation. E.g. (and this is not in Partridge at all, seeing as he seems to pretty much have avoided Black American English, West Indian English, etc.), when Eminem goes, "When I go out I'm a go out shootin' &mdash I don't mean when I die, I mean when I go out to the club, stupid," the term "I'm a" isn't slang for "I am going to"; rather, Eminem is bringing in a rule of pronunciation from a nonstandard dialect of English. The rule is, apparently (I'm no linguist and don't hear much everyday Black American English, but this seems right), that what in standard casual English would be "I'm gonna," in Black English would either be "I gon," without the apostrophe-m or the "na" at the end of "gonna," or "I'm na" or "I'm a" (or a variant spelling of the latter: "Ima," "I'ma," "Imma," "I'mma"), which is "I'm [gon]na" or "I'm [gonn]a" with the "gon"/"gonn" dropped. In my extremely nonextensive attention to this matter, this rule seems adhered to strictly: I've never heard "I'm gon," even among white people who generally speak standard or standard colloquial English and occasionally insert Black English for effect. So the rule is understood quickly, even by those who couldn't tell you the rule. (And the reason I can tell you the rule isn't that I intuited it and brought it to consciousness but that I read it somewhere in something someone wrote about Caribbean English.)

Partridge says that "gonna" is "dial. and, esp. in U.S., low coll.," so he presumably understands the difference between dialect and slang, though of course the boundary between the two isn't always clear: slang is within a dialect, rather than a different dialect; but when you insert from one dialect into another, or mix them, which people do often enough, it's hard to say whether you're speaking slang in dialect A or inserting from dialect B, given that an insert from B can over time become established slang — or even standard usage — in A.

As for goin' round and around, it/they are not even in the 7th Edition. (According to Wikip, he wrote over forty books on English alone, so that number does not include his novels and his books on tennis.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes eric; it's true he mainly lived as an adult and taught and studied in britain -- and his books, if his own introduction is to be trusted, were very successful in the US -- but i catch a certain brusque outsider-impatience from his tone, which i've chosen to interpret as antipodean affection-exasperation in respect of the crusty ways of the aged and decadent metropole (he calls fowler "olympian and austere", neither word one i'd use). Anyway, it's the sense that he comes at English English from a slight angle that's useful to me.

i thought i owned his dictionary of slang but if i do i can't find it -- maybe it's at my dad's house: his entry on slang in usage and abusage spends more time outlining how he defines slang versus argot versus cant, and so on... very faint impression perhaps that he worries his proclaimed expertise over there undermines his authority over here?

[koganbot]

"You cannot edit this comment because someone has replied to it." So note that Eminem did not actually say the word "&mdash" in his song "Remember Me?" — though I think perhaps people should occasionally use the word "m-dash" in speech, when they want to make an addendum or parenthesis especially emphatic. E.g.:

"Never stick anything in your ear" ...[pause]... "M-DASH: unless it's your ELBOW."