Discussion Groups / English Usage / November 2006

I have to say I'm a bit confused, as I don't remember encountering that
particular negative version, but I did sing what I assume is the
original positive version:

    Oh little playmate,              
    Come out and play with me
    And bring your dollies three
    Climb up my apple tree
    Holler down my rain barrel        
    Slide down my cellar door
    And we'll be jolly friends
    Forever evermore.

Is that an anonymous folksong, and was that equally well known to you?
Was the "I don't want" variant perhaps a novelty recording? The *meter*
seems quite different -- is there a sound file on the web?

We did also try to add some negative version, but I think we didn't
always agree on the words, and they weren't the ones given up top.
Googling turns up various versions of the positive original and some
followups. This one is as familiar as any:

    Say, say oh playmate,
    I cannot play with you.
    My dolly has the flu,
    Boohoo, hoohoo, hoo, hoo.      
    Ain't got no rain barrel,
    Ain't got no cellar door.
    But we'll be jolly friends,
    Forever more.

the Omrud wrote:

FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You're right there, Obadiah.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking
Château de Chasselas, eh?
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
A cup o' cold tea.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Without milk or sugar.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Or tea.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
In a cracked cup, an' all.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up
newspaper.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy
you happiness, son".
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old
house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room,
all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we
were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t'
corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace
to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got
woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over
us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a
sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a
lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us
living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic
tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper
bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen
hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got
home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the
morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour
day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to
sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of
shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We
had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for
sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us
in two wit' bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an
hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work
twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to
come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill
us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't
believe you.
ALL:
They won't!

And that ain't the half of it!

UC <uraniumcommittee@yahoo.com> had it:

Was there some point to your quoting the entire Yorkshiremen sketch?

The "aa" in "baath" could also be (and evidently has been) read as the vowel
of "cat", prolonged.

Short of resorting to IPA, I'd render the non-rhotic BrE "bath" as "bahth"
to avoid this ambiguity.

In the UK a bathmat (often "bath mat") is as described by Encarta:

   1. mat beside bathtub: a mat that is placed beside a bathtub or
      shower for somebody to step out onto
   
   2. mat inside bathtub: a mat, often made of rubber, that is
      placed in a bathtub or shower to prevent somebody from
      slipping

I've checked a few retail websites to confirm my thought that the
default BrE meaning of bath mat is a "mat on the floor beside a
bath(tub) or shower".

I first set foot on a bath mat in the days before central heating.
The bath mat performed the dual functions of absorbing water and,
more importantly, keeping the feet warm. Without the mat I would
have been standing on a cold linoleum floor.

Definitely. I have a nice blue one that matches the lino pretty well.
My pronunciation of bathmat is /bATm&t/.

Yes, 'baath' looks to me as though it represents that sound.

The point I was making, and which Roland has caught on to, is that
eye-dialect-style representations are a very poor way to convey
pronunciations in a forum like this. They mean different things to
different people.

When I see 'bath' written with a non-standard spelling, it implies that
it is representing a non-standard pronunciation, which to me indicates
something other than /bAT/ .

--
Regards
John
for mail: my initials plus a u e
at tpg dot com dot au

Yes, for me "tubs" are round or nearly round (cf. "washtub", "tub of
butter"), "bathtubs" are freestanding things with claw feet (cf.  the
one Paul Newman wore a trilby in in *Butch Cassidy*) and "baths" are
what are what are built into many modern bathrooms.