Thanks, Alicia. A stimulating thread.
As someone else has doubtless commented, we should keep an ear open to rhetorical variations of the spoken word associated with heightened emotion.
I recall the Scottish-born mother of sixteen (!)I interviewed at her remote County Derry smallholding a few decades ago when researching home-school relations in rural areas. (She would have left her own elementary school at 14.)
She commented thus on her school-age children: 'Blockheads they go down to the school and blockheads they come up again.'
Best,
Margaret.
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