I'd not heard that one before, but I am becoming (almost) used to hearing words of one syllable become polysyllabilized.

The first time i ever noticed it was some many years ago when I was visiting beautiful downtown Cary NC. The motel in which we were staying was pretty much taken over by a convention of DeMolays and Jobs' Daughters, neither one of which I had ever heard before. About midnight there was a great commotion in the hall and I looked out to see mainly unclad teenagers of both genders chasing one another up and down the hall. In the morning I noticed all these kids all scrubbed and dressed up going to the chapel at the end of the motel. YES, dear friends, I am not making this up, that motel had a chapel! With services nightly and Sunday. I commented to Chris that they'd been up all night sowing their wild oats and were now going in to pray for a crop failure.

But I have digressed. During the night a rather nondescript car had been parked in front of our motel window, and the owner had come out to discover that the front tire was quite flat. So flat, in fact, that he could not get the jack under the bumper, which was resting on the curb. I swear this is true. He got his girlfriend, wife, significant other, whatever she was (she was of the large hair persuasion) to back the car away from the curb. When she had scraped back far enough to let this guy put the jack in place he said, "OK, now put it in pie-ark."

And I have observed it closer to home. MUCH closer. Peggy's accent had pretty much been ameliorated by 10 years of the Denver non-accent, which I find to be a common thing in many metro areas where there is widespread miscegenation of accents. They all tend to blend together.

But now, having gone well into our second year of living here in Marion, she now tells the kids, "It's time for bay-id."

Marion, BTW, is the county seat of a rural county (McDowell) in western NC. There are about 45,000 people in 425 square miles, so it's not densely populated. The phone book lists 43 restaurants and about 90 churches in the county! And I have been told that this latter number is not inclusive because many churches don't have phones. We don't live in the Bible Belt, we live in a belthole in the Bible Belt!

TEd


TEd