Dragaera

evolution in language: OT.now on topic

Mon Feb 7 16:35:40 PST 2005

--- Jot Powers <books at bofh.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 06:00:02AM -0700, Howard Brazee wrote:
> > My wife, from St. Louis, refers to Warshington and Warsh.
> > 
> > It's interesting that the West, where they are more a part of the
> native
> > culture, "rodeo" is pronounced as if it were an English word, but the
> East
> > is more likely to pronounce it as a Spanish word.
> 
> The obvious counter examples to that include jalapeno and saguaro. 
> Although
> my favorite requires the telling of a true story that I got second hand
> from the person who experienced it first hand.
> 
> This person worked for the NIH (National Institute of Health) in
> Washington,
> D.C.  Now, in DC a lot of things tend to be political, and political 
> correctness is rampant.  There was one particular lady who was
> particularly
> militant about that, and one day she decided to browse her "Network 
> Neighborhood" for reasons lost to obscurity.  There she notices a
> computer
> that is named Jesus Saves.  Now, working at a government agency in DC
> this offends her, so she goes to my friend to track down who owns this.
> He laughs and tells her he has other work to do, he might get to it
> eventually.
> This is not good enough for her, so she goes to his boss and causes a
> ruckus.
> Naturally, his boss comes and asks him to track it down.  So he does
> (this
> requires him to determine the MAC address, track which switch it's
> connected to so that they can trace the wiring to find the office). 
> They
> do this and go to the office to talk to the person.  The office of Jesus
> Saves (Hay-zoos Sav-ez).  

I like it, but I don't believe it.  Google has no relevant hits for
"Pablo Saves", "Roberto Saves", "Pancho Saves", or "Paco Saves".
(There are too many false positives to check "Juan Saves" [an
incident from Byron] or "Pedro Saves" [Christmas].)  So I doubt very
much that "Saves" is a Spanish surname.

By the way, since our resident native speaker of Spanish hasn't
said anything, "Hay-soos Sav-es" would be closer.  Speaking of Jose,
here in New Mexico it can be hard to tell whether someone's last
name is "Marquez" or "Marcus".

Jerry Friedman is feeling picky.


		
__________________________________ 
Do you Yahoo!? 
Read only the mail you want - Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard. 
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail