May 03, 2005

Canadian "eh", Brooklyn "hey", hiphop "yo"

In the flurry of posts about Canadian eh, I neglected to link to John McWhorter's post from a year ago about English final yo. John makes a connection to George Herriman's use of final hey in his Krazy Kat strips, and to an episode of the 1940s radio sitcom My Favorite Husband where Lucille Ball characterizes "a gum-chewing girl from Brooklyn" by "postposing HEY to every second sentence".

Posted by Mark Liberman at May 3, 2005 06:27 AM