Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticCat
I took a dialect class in college -- one of the most interesting classes I took -- and we talked about the "stay-live" difference. "Stay" is a dialectical usage, and occurs in a number of dialects (including Scots English  ). I remember our professor saying that, at least as used by some Southern speakers, the usage has African roots and means something slightly different -- I believe it's that "stay" indicates a degree of permance that "live" does not.
FWIW. |
That's very interesting. I grew up on stay, but it didn't mean what you're describing. It was more like "where do you call home" which may or not be your actual place of residence/where you get your mail. For instance, my boyfriend had a room at his parents house but he "lived" with me. He would say "I stay in Athens with my girl" but he didn't mean he was staying there like it was a hotel. He meant he lived there at that time in his life. "Where do you live?" wasn't at all common anywhere.
Now that I've written it down, I realize that a lot of us had roots in several locations. My belongings were scattered among the homes of various family members, but I always had a distinct place in my mind of where I was living at a given time. That's where I "stayed."