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

[Mark Kohut]

Yeah, much more likely and my old English jape is a hardly funny
stretch.........

On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 2:15 PM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>
>