Friday, August 10, 2007

Dance floor linguistics research, and other adventures

Mike and I went out dancing tonight. He tells me that I owned the dance floor for about two and a half hours, and he's probably right. I've got the one-inch diameter patches of ripped skin on my knees to show for it. If you haven't seen the knee-walk, ask me for it whenever I show up in your town. (Not tomorrow, Rochester residents, because I need some time to recover.)

We left the bar when some girl slapped Mike for no easily discernable reason, and went to another place where a pretty sad bachelorette party was going on. As is my way, I brought people out onto the dance floor by doing all the crazy stuff I do, and Mike ended up dancing beautifully with the bride-to-be. If there's a place that the benevolent spirit of the evening wanted us to visit, it was there. We made that party a lot more fun than it otherwise might have been, for all involved. If I spend the rest of the dancing nights of my life livening up dead bachelorette parties -- even with none of the lucky consequences that single men might hope for -- I will have lived well.

When we were at the Pita Pit after all our dancing, a girl came up and told me that when she initially saw me doing the knee-walk, she thought I was horribly injured and didn't have legs.

I also managed to verify the results suggested by the good Aaron Dinkin in the comments to the previous post. Four out of five women who grew up in Rochester and go out on Thursday night pronounce "documentary" with the stress on the next-to-last syllable. The woman from Syracuse does too. I'm eager to be sent out into the field on more linguistics research assignments, so when you hear where I am, let me know what you want me to ask people about.

If you'll pardon me, I'm off to disinfect my torn knees with a spot of Jack Daniels. Have a great night, wherever you are.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dude! Thanks for the (so to speak) "documentary" evidence. You've expanded the range of this pronunciation about 100 miles further west than I was aware of.

Tonight, I'm off to Plattsburgh, NY, and gonna be looking for the same thing there.