Very slow learner seems to have just learned this, maybe.

[Mark Thibodeau]

Interesting, but I don't see that as being the mechanism at work here.
Pynchon's uses of "A-and" strike me as the stutter of the overly
enthusiastic autodidact, subconsciously worried about appearing to be
desirous of showing off his erudition. Or else it could just be an vocal
onomatopoeia, a reflection of a real-life speaking habit that either
Pynchon or a friend (or friends) have unconsciously performed before him,
and it captured his fancy somehow. Kind of like in Vineland, when one of
the biker-nuns shouts "yer wigleen!" (as she attempts to perform some form
of curative acupressure on an unintended victim of the death touch dealt
out by one of her sister nuns) in her perfect southern California cadence.

Jerky

On Sun, Aug 21, 2022 at 2:47 PM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> This appears in explicating Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin'. Which I
> sorta knew.
>
> "The *a- <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a-#Prefix_2>* in the song title
> is
> an archaic intensifying prefix, as in the British songs "A-Hunting We Will
> Go <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-Hunting_We_Will_Go>" and "Here We Come
> a-Wassailing <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_We_Come_A-wassailing>",
> from the 18th and 19th century."
>
> But never until now connected to Pynchon's witty jape: A--And.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>