Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The Frazz cartoon of December 5 (hat tip to Victor Steinbok):

It’s not just Li’l Abner. OED2 has U.S. dialectal druther ‘would rather’ from the 19th century, with the noun variant druther(s), ruther(s) ‘a choice, preference’ (nice quote from Tom Sawyer). It relates the pronunciation to the dialectal variant dern for darn.

This entry was posted on December 9, 2009 at 6:33 am and is filed under Linguistics in the comics, Variation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.