...I hope that was properly conveyed as self-mocking irony. I took it that way, as I am sure you meant it. There are few instances among the rules of punctuation that allow choices between two rights. The apostrophe after a letter or number is one, and the last comma in a series is another. So take...

And so, how does one say the Pepper of Salt and......?

One doesn't.

I never saw the fascination with Strunk and White, although I somehow have managed to acquire two copies. I'm not sure why it's held in such reverence. The reason I use the apostrophe with letters and numbers is that I don't want to worry over constructions like "I's" and "m's" (...

Here an Appaloochy, it's more like pehh-per, with a longer first syllable that your word.

And pay-ee-per is what you write on with a pen, which, or course, rhymes with pin.

That would be "peh-puh" in Charleston.

As I indicated in my earlier post, I'm not bothered by the presence or the absence of apostrophes to form plurals of a letters or numbers. The Chicago Manual of Style (at least the edition I have) requires the apostrophe. My old Harbrace Handbook allows a choice of putting it in or leaving it out. T...

I'm familiar with the Gullah dialect but didn't bring it up here, since it's confined to a population. It's also called Geechee. There is a very good novel called I've Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots, by Susan Straight, that deals with the Gullah-speaking people. It's not as eas...

Everyone tends to oversimplify the Southern accent. Along the east coast, there are at least three: Coastal, Midlands, and Piedmont/Appalachian--the former and latter being very distinct. (Midlands accents are another story altogether.) Charleston natives tend to drop their r's (river = rivuh, dinne...

Just to pick a nit here, but if you were a teenager in the 60s, doesn't that mean you were a child in the 50s. Which leads us to yet another quibbling point: 50's or 50s. That apostrophe should mean it's possessive, no? Well, I was born in 1948, but I was in high school and college in the 60's (or ...

I took the slang test and was pegged as being a child of the 50's. I actually was a teenager in the 60's but grew up in the South, where everything happens about 10 years late.

Some people here still fly the wrong flag, so perhaps 10 years is an underestimation.

Luke,

If you like jokes containing puns--but not simple puns--we can be more holistic when trying to make you laugh.

But you'll have to dig the hole.

They probably removed it when they saw you coming.

I'm off to run some errands. Later.

Double talk.

I saw your e-mail and am glad that you went ahead with that. I've been reading forum posts on the site, but I figured that I dasn't keep my mouth shut too much longer, or you would think that I had become lost in a kudzu patch.

Still working on a way to get avatars to a URL.

Having lived in the Piedmont region of South Carolina all my life, I have heard dasn't on occasion, especially from older folk, but I wasn't aware why the "s" was there. Thanks for the explanation. It holp (past tense of help ) me a lot. I'm new the the alpha agora, having come with others...