ATDTDA (14) Vernacular

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

r's turning into v's...

Barbara Walters's famously mocked accent
("This is Baba Wawa") is but a hairsbreadth
away from manifesting v's

A girl in our Midwestern high school who
had moved to Michigan from New York had
a similar pronunciation for awhile...it was cool

Although my lips don't normally move very
much when I read, I have been finding myself
subvocalizing phrases like "vroight now"

If you minimize the tongue action in "right",
then you end up with "wight"

Then if you bring the lips together almost
to a fricative position, you get the "vright" effect...

Trying to tie this accent into "meaning something"
is probably a lost cause (had a brief moment where
I thought "V.!")
Sassure mention in that book, _The Spell of the
Sensuous_: "[Sassure's] resolute insistence upon
the arbitrariness of the relation between spoken
sounds and hat which they signify led him to 
downplay the influence of mimicry, onomatopoeia, 
and sound symbolism within the life of any language."
--although the author goes on to cite 
Otto Jesperson and others to the effect that
onomatopoeia does play a part in meaning...

what exactly is signified by Plug Loafsley's
accent is beyond my scope, but the transcription
of the accent serves to indicate at least
that Loafsley's cultural pattern is different
from that of the Chums.