Eye dialect and the sound of sirens

My last post, "All my favorite people make me -- is it mað? Măthe? Madh?", is about a version of the Weezer song "All My Favorite Songs" that I heard in a hypnopompic state this morning. Even though only the chorus was included in the dream, I began the post with this image quoting lines from one of the verses:

Black-and-white so as to sidestep the controversy over what color the sky was

In the Weezer song, wishing to be "on an island" presumably means wanting to be in a quiet, isolated spot away from the hustle and bustle of civilization -- but he would "miss the sound of sirens," meaning the police and ambulance sirens that are part of the background noise of a big city. My idea was that by juxtaposing those lines with this image, I could use the same words to express something rather different. Sometimes Odysseus wishes he were home on the island of Ithaca rather than having to spend years at sea, but then he'd miss all the adventures he was having, typified by his being the only mortal to hear the song of the sirens and live to tell the tale. This is certainly where later writers like Dante and Tennyson went with the character of Odysseus, and I think this interpretation is amply justified by Homer. No one really believes the man of many wiles is going to just enjoy a peaceful life on his island and never sail again.

Shortly after I published that post, Bruce Charlton published "Noisiest Bonfire Night ever?" about this year's Guy Fawkes festivities. He specifically mentions the sound of sirens:

Also continuous have been the sirens of the emergency services (fire/ police/ ambulances) - which might, but need not, mean anything very terrible happening, since these vehicles do love making a noise, and need no excuse for doing so. 

This kind of racket is quite exciting . . .

He doesn't go so far as to say he'd miss the sirens if they weren't there, but it's still more positive take on city noise than one might expect. And of course Bruce lives on an island and was commenting on a holiday celebrated only on that island.

Much of my post was about the difficulty of creating an "intuitively understandable pronunciation spelling" to convey how the words sad, mad, and bad were pronounced in the dream. I had almost written "eye dialect" instead of "pronunciation spelling," but then I thought I remembered that the former term is used only for nonstandard spellings of the standard pronunciation. I checked Wikipedia, which confirmed that (boldface in original):

Pronunciation spellings are sometimes used in narratives to represent nonstandard dialects or idiolects to create an impression of backwardness or illiteracy in the speaker. This is called literary dialect, often called eye dialect, though the latter term used to be applied only if the resulting pronunciation is the same as the standard one. For example:

"Pleez, mistur," said the beggar.

The example is meant to show that the beggar is so poorly educated that he says mistur instead of mister. But of course the distinction between the two exists only in writing; spoken, they are the same word. Eye dialect is a close cousin to Walt Kelly's creative use of speech-bubble fonts.

This evening, I went to archive.org and,as usual, got a random /x/ thread en route. This is what I got:

It's a thread about the alleged magical power of the word niggur, which is supposedly a totally different word from nigger. This obviously syncs very closely with the mistur-mister distinction in the Wikipedia article.

Nigger is an anagram of ginger. L. Frank Baum had a character whose name was pronounced like ginger but was spelled Jinjur. General Jinjur led an army that was all-female -- which is a pity, as otherwise Sergeant Pepper would have fit right in.