Posted by Tim on May 22, 1999 at 16:46:04 from wes22.bham.ac.uk:
In Reply to: Re: American kids, British accents and Howdy (2) posted by andy bolger on May 22, 1999 at 01:41:47:
Good point, Jon and Andy. It occurred to me also but only after I had made my posting. It still fits in fairly well, I think, with the 'Rolling stone' hypothesis.
It is of course also possible that 'Howdy' or 'Say howdy' is here not American at all but old-fashioned British. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary gives 'Howdy' along with 'How-do-ye' and 'How-d'ye' as obsolete or dialectal British forms, and there is also the 19th century usage (not noted by the dictionary) of 'Howdy-do' as a substantive ('Here's a Howdy-do' - Gilbert).