Category: Pronunciation

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English English language Etymology Pronunciation Usage Word origin

How do you pronounce “err”?

[Note: This post was updated on Oct. 29, 2021.]

Q: When I pronounced the verb “err” to rhyme with “hair,” a friend (a retired schoolteacher) corrected me and said it rhymes with “her.” Is she correct?

A: No, she erred in “correcting” you. The verb “err,” meaning to be in error or make a mistake, has two pronunciations in standard American English, and most Americans prefer yours.

You can hear both at Merriam-Webster.com’s entry for “err,” where the first pronunciation sounds like AIR and the second like UR. (The dictionary’s big sister, the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged, on the other hand, gives both pronunciations in its text, but offers only one, AIR, at its audible “pronouncer.”)

Eight of the ten standard American and British dictionaries that we regularly consult give both pronunciations. Three of the UK dictionaries indicate that preferences are for AIR in American English and UR in British English.

Americans who use the UR version, by the way, pronounce it as if it rhymed with “her.” However, British speakers drop the “r” and sound only the vowel, as if they were saying “uh” or /ə/, a sound like the “a” in “ago.”

The Oxford English Dictionary, in fact, gives all three pronunciations: UR, AIR, and /ə/.

As it turns out, the original pronunciation sounded like AIR. The UR pronunciation, a later development, eventually became dominant and is still regarded as the “traditional” one by many. But in the last half-century or so, AIR has made a comeback.

Merriam-Webster Unabridged adds some perspective on this in a note.  Originally, it says, the initial vowel of the word “err,” as with “error,” was like the one in AIR.

But over time, the dictionary adds, the word also developed the UR pronunciation. A similar thing happened with the words “curt,” “word,” “bird,” and “were,” which originally had distinctly different vowel sounds that are now pronounced as UR.

Why did this happen? Because of the presence of “r.” As the dictionary says, “The sound of the letter r often colors a preceding vowel in English.”

In the case of “err,” the note continues, “Commentators have expressed a visceral dislike for the original pronunciation [AIR]; perhaps they believe that once usage has established a new pronunciation for a word there can be no going back.”

But, the editors conclude, “no sound reason prevents us from accepting again the [AIR] pronunciation of err, which is today also the more common variant in American speech.”

As we said, today most standard dictionaries accept both AIR and UR as equal variants. Two British dictionaries (like some older Americans who were brought up in the UR tradition) still regard UR or /ə/ as the only acceptable way to say the word “err.”

It’s been suggested that the words “error” and “errant” may have helped to reestablish the AIR pronunciation, which appears to have become acceptable to American lexicographers in the last 50 years or so.

Our 1956 printing of the unabridged Merriam-Webster’s New International Dictionary (2nd ed.), known as Web II, has only the UR pronunciation, with the vowel described as sounding like the one in “urn.”

But AIR began appearing in dictionaries in the 1960s, and now, as we mentioned above, the Unabridged has both but offers only the AIR version on a pronouncer icon.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage notes that “in current usage” (we presume this means American usage) the AIR pronunciation “preponderates.”

As for its etymology, “err” (like “error,” “erroneous,” “erratic,” “errant,” and others) can be traced to a prehistoric Indo-European root reconstructed as er-, which meant “wandering about,” according to John Atyo’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

(Remember that a “knight errant” was an itinerant or traveling knight, roaming in search of adventure.)

As Ayto notes, “the semantic progression from ‘wandering’ to ‘making mistakes’ is reproduced in several other quite unrelated word groups in the Indo-European language family.”

The prehistoric root, he says, “produced Gothic airzei ‘error,’ Old High German irri ‘astray’ (source of modern German irre ‘angry’), Old English ierre ‘astray,’ and Latin errare ‘wander, make mistakes’—from which, via Old French errer, English got err.”

The word was first recorded in English at the turn of the 14th century, when it meant both to go astray and to make a mistake. Each of those meanings, according to OED citations, appears in Robert Manning of Brunne’s 1303 work Handlyng Synne.

Cousins of “err” appeared later in English writing: “error” (circa 1320), “errant” (c. 1369), “erratic” (c. 1374), and “erroneous” (c. 1400).

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English English language Pronunciation Usage

The T sound

Q: I am a Vietnamese who is puzzled by the pronunciation of “t” in American movies.  Sometimes it sounds a little like a “d” and other times I don’t hear any sound at all. Is this just a habit or some odd way of pronunciation—something regional, maybe.

A: What you’re hearing is a normal pronunciation in American English.

The letter “t” isn’t always aspirated crisply, as it is in the words “tea” and “bite.” When it follows a vowel and precedes an unstressed syllable, it’s often a mere flick of the tongue.

Linguists call this sound a “flap” (some use the word “tap,” but it’s the same sound). It somewhat resembles a cross between “t” and “d,” but very much softened.

This is the kind of “t” you heard in those movies, as if the actors were saying alligador or phodograph. (Our use of “d” in those spellings is a gross exaggeration, but it’s as close as we can come to this flapping sound.)

“Water,” “butter,” and “atom” are good examples of words with a flapped “t.” In normal conversation, few Americans clearly aspirate the “t” before the unstressed syllable. They merely tap it with the tongue.

As we said, this flapping happens only if the following syllable is unstressed. Otherwise, the “t” is clearly aspirated, as in “atomic” and “photography.”

There’s another kind of “t” pronunciation you’ll encounter now and then in both American and British English.

This is the “t” that a lot of speakers pronounce as a glottal stop—the air flow through the vocal cords actually stops, skips over the “t,” then is released.

This is quite common when the “t” comes just before an unstressed nasal syllable.

Listen the next time someone says “mitten,” “button,” or “mountain,” and you’ll probably hear a glottal stop. The words will sound like mi’n, bu’n, and moun’n.

Most Americans, as well as growing numbers of British speakers, vocalize “t” as a glottal stop when it comes just before an unstressed nasal syllable.

According to the Macmillan Dictionary online, for example, both American and British speakers pronounce “mitten” with a glottal stop. But most British speakers don’t use the glottal stop for “kitten.”

You can hear the difference for yourself. Macmillan has differing pronunciation keys for “kitten,” both British (with aspirated “t”), and American (with a glottal stop).

The adjective “glottal,” by the way, is a reference to the glottis, the opening between the vocal cords in the larynx. In a glottal stop, the glottis closes, then opens.

The Oxford English Dictionary quotes a homey illustration, from Robert Anderson Hall’s book Introductory Linguistics (1964):

“A complete stoppage of the breath-stream by the vocal cords is called a glottal stop or glottal catch (such as we make between the two oh‘s of ‘Oh-oh!’ when said in surprise or reproof).”

By the way, in looking into the pronunciation of “t,” we learned that many people mistakenly believe the expression “to a T” refers to the tee of golf or a T square or a T-shirt.

The best guess is that “to a T,” which showed up in the late 1600s, is a short form of an earlier expression “to a tittle” (that is, to a dot), which dates from the mid-1500s.

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Immediately, if not sooner

Q: On radio and TV, I have lately been hearing the word “immediately” pronounced with the first syllable emphasized. Is this incorrect or am I just being a nitpicker?

A: You may be a nitpicker, but you’re right about the pronunciation of “immediately.”

The Oxford English Dictionary and the eight standard dictionaries we’ve checked all agree that the second syllable of “immediately” is the one that’s emphasized.

However, lexicographers at these dictionaries recognize a few variations in pronouncing the word.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), for example, lists i-MEE-dee-ut-lee as the usual pronunciation.

However, M-W says Americans sometimes pronounce it i-MEE-dit-lee and Britons often say i-MEE-jit-lee. All three are standard.

The word can be an adverb (“It happened immediately” or “He was sitting immediately behind her”) as well as a conjunction (“Let us know immediately he arrives”). However, its use as a conjunction, meaning “as soon as,” is chiefly British.

The earliest citation in the OED for “immediately” is from John Lydgate’s Troy Book (1412-20), a Middle English poem about the rise and fall of the city: “Fro Troye were sente lettres …To pallamides inmediatly directe.”

Although English borrowed “immediately” from Latin, it ultimately comes from an Indo-European source that gave English the words “medium,” “mediocre,” and “mediate,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Etymologically, Ayto says, the word “immediate” (and, of course “immediately”) refers to “acting directly, without any mediation.”

In case you’re interested, the expression “immediately, if not sooner” showed up in the 19th century. Here’s an early example from an 1833 issue of Fraser’s Magazine, a literary journal in London:

“He was determined to fight; right or wrong, fight he must, and fight he would—immediately, if not sooner.”

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How Jesus got his name

Q: In preparation for an upcoming lecture, I would be interested in knowing if you have any details about how the name of Jesus came into English. Specifically, how did it come to be pronounced so differently from the original Greek/Latin?

A: Jesus was first referred to in Old English as hǽlend, or “savior” (the word wasn’t capitalized). The name we now spell “Jesus” didn’t come into our language until the early Middle English period (1150-1250).

But even then, it wasn’t spelled “Jesus.”

In its earliest written form, the name didn’t end in “s” and didn’t begin with “j” (the letter “j” didn’t exist at the time). The name was spelled “iesu” (names weren’t capitalized then). 

Before getting any further into how the spelling developed in English, let’s take a little detour into the etymology of “Jesus.”

The name came into English from the Latin Iesus, a Roman transliteration of the Greek Iesous.

It had come into Greek from the late Hebrew or Aramaic Yeshua, which was a common name for Jewish boys at the time of Jesus’s birth.

(We’ve capitalized the names here, though proper nouns were treated the same as common nouns in classical Latin and Greek, as well as in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic.)

Yeshua, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, came from the earlier y’hoshua, which can be translated as “God (Yahweh) is salvation” or “God saves.” (Other forms of this name include Yehoshua, Jehoshua, and Joshua.)

The name was first recorded in English as “iesu” around 1175, as part of “iesu cristes” in a book of homilies. The name was written in lowercase letters then, but we’ll follow the modern convention and capitalize it from now on.  

The absence of a final “s” was an influence of Old French, the OED says. “Iesu” represented the Old French objective form of the Latin Iesus, and that was the form that came into Middle English and was used for some 400 years.

The spelling “Iesus,” representing the Latin nominative form, was rarely used in Middle English but became the regular English spelling in the 16th century, according to Oxford.

As we mentioned above, “Jesus” wasn’t originally spelled with a “j” because the letter didn’t exist at the time. The “j” showed up in English, the OED says, as “a comparatively late modification of the letter I.”

The sound itself—the “j” we hear in words like “judge” and “jail”—is relatively new as these things go. Here’s how it developed.

In the ancient Roman alphabet, the letter “i” had two sounds—it was a vowel, but also a consonant sounding like “y.”

Sometime before the sixth century, as the OED explains, this “y” sound in Latin and other languages using the Roman alphabet began changing into a “consonantal diphthong.”

This blend of the consonant sounds “d” and “y” (similar to the sound heard in the English words “odious” and “hideous”) gradually passed into what we now know as the “j” sound.

The result, Oxford says, was that from the 11th to the 17th centuries the  letter “i” had two extremely different sounds—it was both a vowel and a consonant sounding like “j.”

Meanwhile, according to the OED, the guttural letter “g” was undergoing its own evolution, and began to develop a “softer” sound, similar to that of the modern “j.”

Clearly, European printers needed a new letter for a sound hitherto represented by both “i” and “g.” Thus “j,” looking in its lowercase form like an “i” with a tail, appeared—first in 15th-century Spanish and later in other languages using the Roman alphabet.

The new letter became established in English in the mid-1600s, too late for the 1611 King James Version of the Bible.

The earliest example in the OED of the “Jesus” spelling is from a 1632 case in the Court of High Commission, the supreme ecclesiastic court in England at that time:

“That we are as carefull in printeing the Bible as they are of their Jesus’ psalter.”

We couldn’t find any earlier examples in a search of Google Books, but we did find several others from the 1600s.

Although the “differentiation of I and J, in form and value” was completed by 1640, the OED notes, “the feeling that they were, notwithstanding, merely forms of the same letter continued for many generations.”

By the way, “Christ” is not Jesus’s last name. Jews in his time had only one name.

As we’ve written before on the blog, “Christ” is a title meaning “anointed one,” an Anglicized version of the Greek Kristos and the Latin Christus. Originally the first vowel had a short “i” sound, as in “mist.”

In another post, we’ve pointed out that the term “Xmas” has been around for hundreds of years. No, it’s not a modern creation that represents the secularization and/or commercialization of Christmas.

In fact, the use of “X” for “Christ” began nearly a thousand years ago. But you can’t blame secularists. Blame the monks in Great Britain who used “X” for “Christ” while transcribing manuscripts in Old English.

Why “X”? Because the Greek word for Christ, ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ, begins with the letters “chi” (or “X”) and “rho” (or “P”). And the monks used either “X” or “XP” in writing as an abbreviation for “Christ.”

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English English language Etymology Pronunciation Spelling Usage Word origin

“Jail” versus “gaol”

Q: I’m a native Polish speaker who’s learning vocabulary by solving English crosswords. During a coffee break at work, the clue “prison” suggested “jail” for these four spaces: “_A_L.” This sparked a debate with a British friend over “gaol” vs. “jail.” Your thoughts?

A: Both spellings have been around for hundreds of years. The traditional spelling has been “gaol” in Britain and “jail” in the United States.

Although “gaol” is still acceptable in Britain, it’s now considered a variant spelling of “jail” on both sides of the Atlantic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and the four standard British dictionaries we’ve checked.

As Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.) explains, “gaol, gaoler, the traditional spellings in the UK, are now under severe and probably unstoppable pressure from jail, jailer, which are dominant in most other parts of the English-speaking world.”

Both pairs—“gaol, gaoler” and “jail, jailer”—are pronounced the same way, which leads to this question: why do the British have a “gaol” spelling if the word is pronounced “jail”?

The short answer, according to Oxford Dictionaries online, is that the word “gaol” was “originally pronounced with a hard g, as in goat.” Here’s a fuller answer.

“Etymologically, a jail is a ‘little cage,’ ” John Ayto says in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto explains that the English word is ultimately derived from caveola, a diminutive of cavea, Latin for cage (and the source of the English word “cage”).

Why do we have two spellings? Because Middle English (the language spoken from about 1100 to 1500) adopted two distinct versions of the word from French.

The “gaol” version comes from the Norman French gaiole or gaole, the OED says, while “jail” comes from the Old Parisian French jaiole or jaile.

Early versions of “gaol” (like gayhol and gayhole) first showed up in English in the 1200s, while early versions of “jail” (iaiole and iayll) appeared in the 1300s, according to Oxford citations.

“Until the 17th century,” Ayto writes, “gaol was pronounced with a hard /g/ sound, but then it gradually fell into line with jail.”

The two versions of the word were spelled all sorts of ways in Middle English, when our language had no letter “j”: gayhol, gayhole, gayll, gaylle, gaille, gayole, and so on. The “gaol” and “jail” spellings first showed up in the 1600s.

The OED describes “gaol” as an “archaic spelling” that’s still seen in writing “chiefly due to statutory and official tradition” in Britain. However, the dictionary adds that “this is obsolete in the spoken language, where the surviving word is jail.”

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Lozenge or lozenger?

Q: This sets my teeth on edge: Why is it that so many people, especially in the NY area, say “lozenger” instead of “lozenge”?  Isn’t this incorrect?

A: The sweetened, medicated tablet is spelled “lozenge” and pronounced LAH-zinj in standard English, according to dictionaries in the US and the UK.

However, the Oxford English Dictionary says a variant spelling, “lozenger” (pronounced LAH-zin-jer), is present in the US and northern England.

The OED describes this variant as dialectal—that is, a regional or social variation from standard English.

The Dictionary of American Regional English says the variant is present in various parts of the US, though chiefly in the Northeast.

Although most DARE examples of the usage are from New England and the Middle Atlantic states, the regional dictionary has quite a few citations from other parts of the US, including Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, and Ohio.

The DARE editors suggest that the American usage may have crossed the pond with speakers of Scottish English and regional dialects in England.

The ultimate source, though, may be an obsolete usage that the OED traces to the early 1500s, when the term “lozenger” was apparently used to describe a diamond-shaped, four-sided figure—the original sense of the word “lozenge.”

However, Oxford has only one written example of this early usage, from a 1527 will in which the word is spelled “losinger.”

As for “lozenge” used in its geometric sense, the OED defines it as “a plane rectilineal figure, having four equal sides and two acute and two obtuse angles.”

The dictionary has several questionable citations dating from the early 1300s. The first clear example is from “The House of Fame,” a poem by Chaucer written around 1384: “Somme crouned were as kinges, / With crounes wroght ful of losenges.”

As we’ve said, the term “lozenger,” as well as the pronunciation LAH-zin-jer, isn’t standard English. But it’s common enough that the first item to come up when we googled the word was a Vicks ad for cough drops and similar products.

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English English language Expression Linguistics Pronunciation Usage

Empire State-ments

Q: Why do we (OK, New Yorkers) pronounce the “Empire State Building” with emphasis on “State,” while we emphasize “Empire” when the words are just “Empire State”?

A: We’ve had this thought ourselves. When people (and not just New Yorkers) say the “Empire State,” they emphasize the first word over the second: “EMPIRE State.”

Similarly, residents of Connecticut refer to the “NUTMEG State,” Californians to the “GOLDEN State,” New Jerseyans to the “GARDEN State,” and so on.

So why does the principal stress shift to the second word when people say “the Empire STATE Building”?

In 2006, on the building’s 75th anniversary, the novelist Benjamin Kunkel wrote a small piece for the New York Times commenting on “our curious pronunciation of those four words.”

“Let’s say you had a building named, as ours would seem to be, after the Empire State, New York,” Kunkel wrote. “In that case, the usual way for a native speaker of American English to pronounce the two middle words of the name would be as a dactyl: ‘EM-pire state,’ you’d say. But we don’t say it like that. Instead we employ what in prosody is called an anapest: ‘em-pire STATE,’ with the accent, that is, on the word ‘state’ rather than on the word ‘empire.’ Say it and see for yourself: it’s ‘em-pire STATE build-ing,’ not ‘EM-pire state build-ing.’ ” 

But Kunkel didn’t offer a good reason why.

Generally, when an identifying adjective modifies “building,” the adjective is emphasized over the noun (“office building,” “apartment building,” etc.).

The same is true when a building has a proper name—the modifier gets the emphasis: “CHRYSLER Building,” “FLATIRON Building,” “WOOLWORTH Building,” “SEAGRAM Building,” and so on.

When “Building” is preceded  by a compound, then the principal emphasis falls on the word that’s normally emphasized in that compound: “Time-LIFE Building,” “LEHMAN Brothers Building,” “New York LIFE Insurance Building,” “Manufacturers Hanover TRUST Building,” “WARNER Brothers Building,” “Universal PICTURES Building,” “New York TIMES Building.”

So if we emphasize the first word in the phrase “EMPIRE State,” why don’t Americans call it the “EMPIRE State Building”? 

We have to admit that we don’t have an answer. And neither, apparently, does anyone else.

We did find a discussion of this subject on a respected language website, but it wasn’t much help.

The linguist Mark Lieberman, writing on the Language Log, noted that when “Building” is modified by a compound,” the main stress generally falls on the expected main stress” of that compound.

“Thus,” he wrote, “what used to be the Field Building in Chicago is now the LaSalle National Bank Building—and I assume (without ever having heard it pronounced) that the main stress ought to be on bank.”

He went on to say that “since New York is the Empire State—with main stress on state—it follows that the Empire State Building ought also to have main stress on state.”

But as we’ve said, and as some readers of the Language Log pointed out, the stress in the two-word phrase “Empire State” is on “Empire,” not on “State.” So that leaves us back where we started.

Of course, “Empire STATE Building” is easier to say than one strong syllable followed by five weak ones: “EM-pire-state-build-ing.” And yet, a string of unaccented syllables doesn’t seem to bother people who say (or used to say) “LEH-man-broth-ers-build-ing.”

Dictionaries aren’t much help here, either. The Collins English Dictionary says the phrase “Empire State Building” is pronounced with accents on the first syllables of “Empire” and “Building.” Well, perhaps by some English speakers, but not by Americans.

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary online gives “Empire STATE Building” for both the British and the American pronunciations.

If we do find an answer to this mystery, you’ll be the first to know!

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From minutia to minutiae

Q: I never hear people say “minutia” and mean “minutia” (i.e., a minor detail). They always use it to mean “minutiae” (minor details). And they pronounce it mi-NOO-shee-uh or mi-NOO-shuh, which is understandable considering how ungainly mi-NOO-shee-ee is. Are we witnessing the conflation of these singular and plural forms?

A: Standard dictionaries define “minutia” as a small or trivial detail, and “minutiae” as small or trivial details. Yet “minutia” is often used to mean “minutiae,” and “minutiae” is often pronounced like “minutia.”

This is nothing new, however. Both words have been used as singulars and plurals since they first showed up in English in the 18th century. And their pronunciations have been all over the place.

Confused? Well, don’t look to Latin for help.

In classical Latin, “minutia” didn’t even mean a small or minor detail, nor did “minutiae” mean small or minor details. Here are the details.

The source of these two words was minutus, which meant small in classical Latin. Minutia and minutiae were singular and plural nouns for smallness—the quality or state of being small.

In the late Latin of the 4th century, minutiae came to mean small or trivial details, but minutia continued to mean smallness.

It wasn’t until “minutia” showed up in English in the 18th century that it took on its small or trivial sense—in both singular and plural versions!

The first of these Latin words to enter English was “minutiae,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines it initially as a plural meaning “precise details; small or trivial matters or points.”

The earliest example in the OED is from Samuel Richardson’s 1748 epistolary novel Clarissa: “I have always told you the consequence of attending to the minutiæ.”

However, the dictionary also has examples from the late 18th century to the year 2000 of “minutiae” used in the singular to mean “a precise detail; a small or trivial matter or point”—that is, “minutia.”

The first OED citation for “minutiae” used in the singular is from The Beggar Girl and Her Benefactors, a 1797 novel by Anna Maria Bennett (she wrote as “Mrs. Bennett”): “Strict attention to every minutiæ of her domestic arrangement.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the singular “minutia” is from Elizabeth Blower’s 1782 novel George Bateman: “On the observance of some little minutias, no small share of the beauty … depended.”

The first Oxford example that refers to just one “minutia” is from Washington Irving’s 1841 biography of the poet Margaret Miller Davidson:

“That holy patriotism which could toil and bleed, ere it would yield one single minutia of that independence bequeathed to them by the valour of their immortal sires.”

The earliest written example of “minutia” used in the plural is from Charles Burney’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio (1796): “Descending to the minutia of all the events and occasions which may be imagined.”

The OED offers the singular and plural versions of both “minutia” and “minutiae” with no warning labels—in other words, no indication that these usages are anything but standard English.

Only a handful of standard dictionaries in the US and the UK have entries for the singular “minutia,” perhaps because the word is used so rarely to mean a small or trivial detail. When we see “minutia” online, it’s almost always used as a plural.

In fact, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language dropped its entry for the singular “minutia” from the latest edition, the fifth.

Pronunciation guides in standard American dictionaries indicate that “minutia” is pronounced mi-NOO-shee-uh and “minutiae” is pronounced mi-NOO-shee-ee,  mi-NOO-shee-eye, mi-NOO-shee-uh, or mi-NOO-shuh. The NOO in both words can also be NYOO.

However, our experience is that many, if not most, Americans pronounce “minutiae” as mi-NOO-shuh. And few Americans use “minutia” to mean a small detail.

As for British pronunciations, the OED says “minutia” can be either my-NYOO-shee-uh or mi-NYOO-shee-uh while “minutiae” can my-NYOO-shee-eye, mi-NYOO-shee-eye, my-NYOO-shee-ee, or mi-NYOO-shee-ee.

In other words, you can probably defend just about any likely use of “minutia” and “minutiae.”

As for us, we pronounce “minutiae” as mi-NOO-shuh. And we don’t use “minutia.” If we did want to refer to a small or trivial detail, we suppose we’d call it something like a “trifle,” a “triviality,” or perhaps even a “trivial detail.”

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English English language Etymology Grammar Linguistics Pronunciation Spelling Usage Word origin

Texicography

Q: Your July 9 blog about how to pronounce “texted” inspires me to write about a ubiquitous and annoying pronunciation of the past tense of “text” here in Cincinnati. Young people almost exclusively pronounce the present as “tex” and the past as “text.” Maybe the past would be spelled “texed,” but that doesn’t change the pronunciation. Have you heard this in your area?

A: No, we weren’t aware of the usage until you mentioned it.

But on looking into this we find that quite a few people consider to “tex” the infinitive, with “tex” or “texes” the present, and “text” the past.

Others consider “tex” or “texes” the present, and “texed” (pronounced TEXT) the past tense. And still others use “text” or “texts” for the present and “text” for the past.

Interestingly, these usages aren’t confined to speech. We got more than half a million hits in Google searches for “tex” and “texed” used in place of “text” and “texted.”

And the linguist Arnold Zwicky, in searches for past tenses and past participles, found roughly one example of “text” for every five of “texted.”

This isn’t an overnight phenomenon, either, and it’s not limited to Cincinnati.

A July 25, 2005, article in the Modesto Bee, for example, reported that a friend sent this text message to the cell phone of a California teenager killed in a car crash:

“Tex me when u get to heaven.”

(Family members found the message on 16-year-old Stephanie Blevins’s phone.)

In standard English, as you know, the infinitive or root verb is “text,” the present tense is “text” or “texts,” and the past tense (as well as the past participle) is “texted.”

Why all the variants? We think pronunciation has a lot to do with this.

Some people hear the verb “text” as if it were spelled “texed,” and assume it’s a past tense. Naturally, the present tense would be “tex” or “texes.” (Think of “fax,” “faxes,” and “faxed.”)

The phonetician John Wells notes on his blog that the confusion here apparently lies with the consonant cluster at the end of “text.”

“The final cluster [kst] is highly susceptible to losing its final consonant, particularly when followed by a consonant sound,” Wells writes.

In words with similar-sounding endings (like “next,” “boxed,” and “mixed”), he says, “it’s usual for the final [t] to be elided (lost) except in very careful (over-enunciated) speech.”

The linguist David Crystal, however, finds “nothing intrinsically difficult about the consonant cluster at the end of text.”

“But adding an -ed ending alters the pronunciation dynamic,” he writes on his blog. “We now have two /t/ sounds in a rapid sequence, as we had in broadcasted.”

Although it’s “very unusual to find a new irregular past tense form in standard English,” Crystal says, it “does happen, as we see with the preference for shorter broadcast.”

He predicts that lexicographers will one day recognize “texed” as a legitimate past tense. We’re not so sure, but we’ll let Crystal have the last word.

“Whatever the reasons, we do now find forms such as texed and tex’d being used with increasing frequency,” he writes. “I think it’s only a matter of time before we find it being treated like broadcast in dictionaries, and given two forms.”

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How the Bard and Cicero spoke

Q: In one of your quizzes, you say, “The accent we now associate with educated British speech didn’t develop until after the American Revolution.” I am not doubting this, but I question how you know. I recall the same question learning Latin: how does anyone know the way Romans pronounced words?

A: We’ve written often on our blog about the way English was pronounced in the past, including a post last year about efforts to present Shakespeare’s plays in Elizabethan English.

In that item about what is known as Original Pronunciation, we explain how linguists have reconstructed the sounds of Elizabethan speech. Here’s an excerpt:

“First, contemporary authors wrote commentaries on the pronunciation of their day.

“Ben Jonson, for instance, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a book on grammar in which he discussed the proper sounding of r after a vowel, as in ‘far’ and ‘heart.’ He described it as ‘growly.’

“Second, we have the evidence of the spellings Shakespeare used. In those days, spelling was not yet standardized, and people spelled words as they sounded to them.

“Shakespeare originally spelled the word ‘film’ (meaning a membrane) as ‘philom’—so it would have had two syllables, ‘fillum.’ As we know, that’s the pronunciation of ‘film’ used by the Irish today.

“Third, there are the rhythms, puns, and rhymes Shakespeare used, many of which don’t quite work in modern English—either British or American.

“When we hear some of these passages recited in Original Pronunciation, we can appreciate many of the puns and rhymes that Shakespeare intended.”

How, you ask, do we know the way the ancient Romans spoke Latin?

In Vox Latina: A Guide to the Pronunciation of Classical Latin (1965), W. Sidney Allen offers details of how scholars have reconstructed the ancient pronunciation.

Michael A. Covington, a linguist at the University of Georgia, has a brief online summary of Allen’s explanation:

“The Latin alphabet was meant to be entirely phonetic. Unlike us, the ancient Romans did not inherit their spellings from any earlier language. What you see is what you get.

“Language teaching was big business in Roman times, and ancient Roman grammarians give us surprisingly detailed information about the sounds of the language.

“Languages derived from Latin give us a lot of evidence. In fact, many of the letters of the alphabet are pronounced the same way in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. It stands to reason that the original Latin pronunciation has survived.

“Spelling errors made by the ancient Romans are very informative. If two letters are often mixed up, they must sound fairly similar. Likewise, if two letters are never mixed up, we know they sounded different.”

“Here’s an example. In classical times, the natives had no trouble keeping ae distinct from e; if they ever misspelled ae it came out ai. Later on, they started changing ae to e. That enables us to pinpoint when the sound of ae changed.

“Finally, transcriptions into other writing systems, such as Greek and Sanskrit, often pin down the ancient pronunciation of Latin very precisely.”

Although scholars may know quite a bit about how Caesar spoke Latin, the Latin spoken today doesn’t necessarily reflect their scholarship.

We’re simplifying things here, but there are lots of different Latins–church Latin, botanical Latin, schoolhouse Latin, and so on–with lots of different pronunciations.

For example, scholars say Julius Caesar pronounced his name YOO-lee-us KYE-sahr, but it’s pronounced YOO-lee-us CHAY-sahr in church Latin in Italy and JOO-lee-us SEE-zer in historical references in English.

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Much ado about texting

Q: How do you pronounce the past tense of “text” (a word, mind you, that is yet to be recognized by the Oxford Dictionary)? The two-syllable pronunciation, TEXT-ed, sounds too juvenile to me. I prefer one syllable, along the lines of “ask” and “asked.” Please advise.

A: The verb “text” does indeed appear in the Oxford English Dictionary as well as in the Oxford Dictionaries online.

It’s also in many standard dictionaries, including the two we consult the most: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Dictionaries don’t generally provide pronunciation guides for past tenses unless there’s something unusual about them.  However, the dictionaries sometimes use dots to show that a past tense is divided into separate syllables.

American Heritage, for example, lists the past tense of “text” as “text·ed,” indicating that the word has two syllables.

As for us, we pronounce “texted” as TEXT-ed, and we’ve never heard it pronounced otherwise.

The linguist Arnold Zwicky shed some light on “texted” in a blog post he wrote on the subject in 2008.

“The big point,” Zwicky says in his article, “is that novel verbs—verbed nouns in particular—are almost invariably entirely regular in their inflection.”

Thus a noun like “text,” when it becomes a verb, will ordinarily form its past tense and past participle with the addition of “-ed.”

He notes that a small number of very old, mostly monosyllabic verbs ending in “-t” and “-d” (like “hit” and “bid”) don’t add “-ed.” He calls these “bare past” verbs. And of course there are the well-known irregular verbs like “shrink,” “run,” “sing,” and so on.

“But, generally,” he says, “when a new verb enters English—by borrowing from another language, by verbing a noun or adjective, or whatever—it’s entirely regular.”

And that’s what would make a past-tense form like “text” unusual. “In the case of the verb text (in its recent, electronic, sense), the lexicographers and other authorities go for texted,” Zwicky says.

He notes, for example, that the linguist David Crystal’s book Txtng (2008) has “texted” as the past tense.

Yet, as we said above, “texted” may not appear in a particular dictionary—at least not in an obvious way.

“As a general practice,” Zwicky says, “most dictionaries don’t list most inflected forms, because listing perfectly regular inflected forms would just be a waste of precious space. So absence of a listing is evidence of regularity.”

By the way, we see online that some people are still complaining about the use of “text” as a verb. They insist on “send a text message.”

We once felt the same way and wrote about it on the blog, but times change, and so does language.

Merriam-Webster’s, for instance, gives these three examples of how the verb “text” is used: “I texted her a little while ago” … “I texted a message to her” … “She just texted me back.”

A March 2004 draft edition to the online OED defines the verb “text” as “to send (a text message) to a person, mobile phone, etc.” and “to communicate by sending text messages.”

The earliest Oxford citation for the usage is in a March 14, 1998, message on the Usenet newsgroup alt.cellular.gsm: “We still keep in touch … ‘texting’ each other jokes, quotes, stories, questions, etc.”

However, the word “text” has been used as a verb since the late 1500s, according to written examples in the OED.

When the verb first appeared, it meant “to inscribe, write, or print in a text-hand or in capital or large letters,” but the dictionary describes that sense as obsolete.

Here’s an example from Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing (1600): “Yea and text vnder-neath, here dwells Benedick the married man.”

The OED has citations from the 1500s and 1600s for another obsolete sense: “to cite a text at or against (a person).”

And it has citations up until the late 1800s for the verb used to mean “to write in text-hand.”

The dictionary’s latest citation for the verb is from the July 31, 2001, electronic edition of a British newspaper, the Leicester Mercury: “I texted my mother and my friends when I got my results.”

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Wooder, wooder, everywhere?

Q: I’ve noticed that the word “water” is pronounced wooder in Central Jersey, but not in South Jersey or North Jersey. Are you familiar with this pronunciation? Is it heard elsewhere?

A: In areas of New Jersey and Pennsylvania that are part of the Delaware Valley region—particularly in Philadelphia—the word “water” often sounds like wooder or wooter (the first vowel is pronounced as in “put”).

This may be the best-known feature of what’s sometimes called “Philly-speak.” There are many others: “towel” may sound like tal, “bagel” like beggle, “dentist” like dennis, and “go” like gow.

But the familiar sounds of this dialect are changing as the years go by, according to language scholars. Some features—like wooder—are weakening while others are getting stronger.

In an interview with the Associated Press in April, the linguist William Labov said the first syllable of the Philly-ism wooder is moving toward an ah sound. A similar evolution is happening with the Philly version of “coffee.”

“That sound is moving toward ‘ah’ so instead of ‘cawfee’ more Philadelphians are saying ‘coffee,’ ‘wooder’ becomes ‘water,”’ Labov said. “As people become aware … they tend to reverse them. They say, ‘Oh we shouldn’t talk that way.’ ”

As for another feature of Philadelphia speech, pronouncing “go” as gow, Labov said that “it got stronger and stronger, until people born around 1950, 1960, when it turned around and it went the other way.”

Labov, who has been studying Mid-Atlantic accents for 40 years, published a paper in the March 2013 issue of the journal Language about changes in Philadelphia speech.

In the paper, “One Hundred Years of Sound Change in Philadelphia,” Labov and two colleagues, Ingrid Rosenfelder and Josef Fruehwald, discuss the speech patterns of 379 Philadelphians who were born between 1888 and 1991.

The three University of Pennsylvania linguists turned decades of recordings into computerized voice spectrographs that let them track sound changes over time.

The paper can be hard going for a non-linguist, but the University of Pennsylvania issued a news release that summarizes the findings in simpler English.

The paper, according to Penn News, attributes many of the changes to the linguistic “Northernization” of the Philadelphia region:

“The traditional Southern inflections associated with Philadelphia native-born speakers are increasingly being displaced by Northern influences.”

The news release says the three linguists looked for an explanation of the changes “in the relation of Philadelphia to its geographic neighbors.” Here’s a brief description of the paper’s conclusions:

“In the earlier period, many Philadelphia features resembled those found in Southern dialects, and these are the changes that have reversed direction.

“Those that have not are movements towards patterns heard in the Northern dialects of western New England, New York state and the Great Lakes Region.”

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A classical education

Q: My question for you has to do with my son, Thales, who’s named after the ancient Greek philosopher. Is the plural possessive of his name Thales’ (like Achilles’) or Thales’s (like James’s)? Also, do you pronounce it with two syllables or three.

A: This is a complicated question, since Thales is a classical name being used by someone living now.

Ordinarily, as we’ve written on our blog, a name ending in “s” is made possessive with the addition of an apostrophe and a final “s,” as in “James’s sailboat.”

In the past, classical and biblical names were an exception. Those ending in “s” were customarily made possessive without the extra “s” (as in “Achilles’ armor” and “Jesus’ disciples”).

In modern usage, however, this custom is no longer universally followed, as we wrote in a posting last year.

Today, classical and biblical names ending in “s” are frequently made possessive just like other names—with the extra “s.” And they’re pronounced, as one would expect, with an extra syllable.

That’s the word from the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.). Although some other guides recommend skipping the final “s,” the Chicago Manual says “such usage disregards pronunciation and is therefore not recommended by Chicago.”

Among the examples in the Chicago Manual are “Jesus’s adherents,” “Jesus’s sake,” “Tacitus’s Histories,” “Euripides’s tragedies,” and “Xerxes’s armies.”

This would seem to indicate that the name Thales, which has two syllables (THAY-leez), would become possessive as Thales’s, pronounced with three syllables (THAY-leez-ez).

But there’s a fly in the ointment. Chicago says possessive forms of classical and biblical names that end in an “eez” sound (like Thales and Hercules) are generally NOT pronounced with an extra syllable, even when spelled with an extra “s.”

So if you followed the Chicago Manual guidelines, you’d end up writing the possessive as Thales’s but not pronouncing the extra syllable, which seems silly to us. If that extra syllable is indicated in the spelling, it ought to be pronounced, in our opinion.

At bottom, of course, this is an issue of style, not correctness. In the end, the choice is really up to you (and to your son!).

Here’s what we advise. First, decide how you want to SAY the possessive form of his name, since you’ll be pronouncing it more often than you write it.

If you prefer to say “THAY-leez sailboat,” then spell it Thales’. But if you prefer to say “THAY-leez-ez sailboat,” with the extra syllable, then write the possessive form as Thales’s.

That’s the best advice we can come up with. If anyone questions your choice, you can argue reasonably for either one.

After all, your son isn’t a classical figure—he’s simply named for one: Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece.

People are entitled to decide how their names are pronounced, as we noted in a blog item a few years ago. So why can’t Thales decide how the possessive of his name should sound?

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A chasm in pronunciation

Q: During Gwen Ifill’s interview with Sonia Sotomayor earlier this year, the Supreme Court justice pronounced “chasms” with the “ch” of “chat.” Has this pronunciation always been around and I’m just noticing it now?

A: In the Feb. 20, 2013, interview on PBS, Ifill asked about the associate justice’s comment in her memoir, My Beloved World, that she sees “bridges where other people see chasms.”

Sotomayor responded that one of “the lessons that I share in the book” is that you can accomplish more “if you build bridges and not chasms.”

In asking her question, Ifill pronounced “chasms” with the “ch” of “choir.” In answering her, Sotomayor pronounced it with the “ch” of “child.”

Who’s right? Well, the standard English pronunciation for “chasm” is KA-zum. The word starts with a hard “k” sound.

But the justice’s pronunciation may have been influenced by her Hispanic heritage. In Spanish, words beginning with ch are pronounced with a soft, sibilant sound, as in cheque, chico, and chocolate.

In English,  however, the consonant cluster “ch” is pronounced as a “k” in some words (like “chaos,” “Christ,” “school,” and “chemist”), and as a sibilant in others (“church,” “cheer,” “touch,” “chip”).

“Chasm” is in the first category—the “k” words. And despite the justice’s sibilant usage, the standard pronunciation hasn’t changed.

We’ve checked every source that’s available to us, from the Oxford English Dictionary  to a dozen or more standard British and American dictionaries, and the answer is always the same.

As the OED explains, English borrowed “chasm” in the 16th century from the Latin chasma, which in turn came from the Greek khasma (a yawning hollow).

In both Latin and Greek, the word starts with a “k” sound, and that pronunciation was preserved when the word was adopted into English.

Early on, the word was written in English as “chasma,” an exact reproduction of the Latin spelling. But by the 18th century, the spelling stabilized as “chasm.”

In its earliest uses, the word meant “a yawning or gaping, as of the sea, or of the earth in an earthquake,” the OED says.

Oxford’s earliest citation is from Charles Fitz-Geffrey’s biography Sir Francis Drake (1596): “Earth-gaping Chasma’s, that mishap aboades.”

By the early 1600s, the modern geological meaning had  become established. Here’s the OED’s definition:

“A large and deep rent, cleft, or fissure in the surface of the earth or other cosmical body. In later times extended to a fissure or gap, not referred to the earth as a whole, e.g. in a mountain, rock, glacier, between two precipices, etc.”

At about the same time, looser meanings were also being recorded, and a “chasm” could be a cleft in any structure (like a building).

Figurative uses also appeared in the 17th century, the OED says, so a “chasm” could mean “a break marking a divergence, or a wide and profound difference,” and in fact it could mean a breach or gap in almost anything.

In her interview on PBS NewsHour,  Sotomayor used the word figuratively when she talked about building “bridges and not chasms.” (In her book, we should note, she actually writes of “bridges” and “walls,” not “bridges” and “chasms.”)

In short, the various meanings of “chasm” are well established, and so is its pronunciation.

 

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NOO-kya-lur reactions

Q: The more I learn about English, the more I find myself wondering whether something is an error or just an acceptable variant. Now for my question: Is it acceptable to pronounce “nuclear” as NOO-kya-lur instead of NOO-klee-ur?

A: We discussed this subject several years ago on our blog when a reader complained about President George W. Bush’s pronunciation of the word.

As we wrote back in 2008, Bush was far from the only US president to take liberties with “nuclear.” At least three others—Eisenhower, Carter, and Clinton—did so too.

Although the NOO-kya-lur pronunciation is very widespread, we said in that posting, it’s frowned on by many.

We wrote then that both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) noted the objections.

We’ve now checked a newer edition of American Heritage and a newer printing of Merriam-Webster’s, but not much has changed.

A usage note in the new fifth edition of American Heritage says the NOO-kya-lur pronunciation “is generally considered incorrect” and is “an example of how a familiar phonological pattern can influence an unfamiliar one.”

AH adds that the “usual pronunciation of the final two syllables” is klee-ur, “but this sequence of sounds is rare in English.”

The usage note says the kya-lur sequence is “much more common” and “occurs in words like particular, circular, spectacular, and in many scientific words like molecular, ocular, and vascular.”

It says the “NOO-kya-lur” pronunciation “is often heard in high places” and “is not uncommon in the military in association with nuclear weaponry.”

Despite “the prominence of these speakers,” American Heritage concludes, the NOO-kya-lur pronunciation “was considered acceptable to only 10 percent of the Usage Panel in our 2004 survey.”

A usage note from the latest printing of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate  says the NOO-kya-lur pronunciation is “disapproved of by many.”

But Merriam-Webster’s notes that the pronunciation is “in widespread use among educated speakers,” including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, cabinet members, and presidents.

The dictionary adds that the NOO-kya-lur pronunciation has “also been heard from British and Canadian speakers.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage makes many of the same points and suggests that people use the variant kya-lur ending because they have trouble pronouncing “nuclear” with klee-ur at the end.

The usage guide adds that “there is no other common word in English” with a klee-ur ending. (The italics are in the entry.)

We take issue with this last point. At least two common English words, “likelier” and “sicklier,” have that ending. And English speakers don’t seem to have problems pronouncing them.

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We’re on safari

Q: I have a memory of my mother pronouncing “safari” as suh-FAIR-ee instead of suh-FAR-ee. Is this a correct pronunciation? Where does it come from?

A: Either pronunciation of “safari” is correct. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives both as standard.

Merriam-Webster’s says the second vowel can be pronounced like the vowel in “mop” or in “ash.” So you can be justified in using either.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), on the other hand, gives only one pronunciation, with the second vowel pronounced like the broad “a” in “father.”

English borrowed the word “safari” in the 19th century from Swahili, in which it means journey or expedition, the Oxford English Dictionary says.

The Swahili word, Oxford adds, ultimately comes from Arabic, where the noun safar means a journey or tour and the verb safara means to travel, depart, or go on a journey.

In English, “safari” originally meant “a party or caravan undertaking an extensive cross-country expedition on foot for hunting or scientific research, typically in an African country (originally in East Africa),” the OED explains.

Later, the word came to mean other kinds of forays, including “a party travelling, usually in vehicles, into unspoiled or wild areas for tourism or game viewing.” And many extended meanings of the term developed later.

The word was first recorded in English by the explorer Sir Richard F. Burton in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London in 1859:

“These Safari are neither starved like the trading parties of Wanyamwezi nor pampered like those directed by the Arabs.”

This later example is from an 1871 journal entry by the explorer and missionary David Livingstone: “A safari, under Hassani and Ebed, arrived with news of great mortality by cholera … at Zanzibar.”

A historical note: This was the ailing Dr. Livingstone who had lost contact with the rest of the world and was eventually tracked down by the journalist Henry Morton Stanley after a two-year search. Stanley later claimed to have greeted him with the words “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

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Inaugural pronunciations

Q: Please comment on the pronunciation of “inauguration” as
in-aw-guh-RAY-shun. When did this pronunciation become so ubiquitous, even among NPR news readers? Is it “wrong”?

A: Times change, and the pronunciation of “inauguration” is a good example.

When we discussed this subject three years ago on our blog, we said the only pronunciations of “inaugurate,” “inauguration,” and “inaugural” we’d ever heard had a “y” sound in the third syllable: in-AW-gyuh-rate … in-aw-gyuh-RAY-shun … in-AW-gyuh-rel.

And we said those were the only pronunciations given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.).

But we also noted that one dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), included the non-“y” pronunciations as equal variants: in-AW-guh-rate … in-aw-guh-RAY-shun … in-AW-guh-rel. (As we said in 2010, that last one sounds to us like “doggerel.”)

But apparently the flatter pronunciations are taking hold. Since we wrote that post, a fifth edition of American Heritage has been published, and that dictionary now accepts the pronunciations minus the “y” sound.

A pronunciation can’t be considered “wrong” if even one standard dictionary accepts it. And certainly the evidence of two dictionaries means the “y”-less pronunciations of “inaugurate,” “inauguration,” and “inaugural” are now entrenched in standard English.

We still believe that most people pronounce “inauguration” and its derivatives with a “y” sound. But the people have a choice!

Inaugurations, of course, augur new beginnings. In 2011 we wrote about the etymology of “augur,” the word at the root of “inauguration.”

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What kind of abbreviation is K-9?

Q: I’m curious about the term “K-9” that appears on the doors of LAPD patrol cars that carry dogs. Is there a proper term for this type of word shortening?

A: “K-9” is obviously an abbreviation, because it’s a short form of a longer word, “canine.” But what kind of abbreviation is it?

Two common kinds of abbreviations are the “acronym” and the “initialism,” which differ in the way they’re spoken.

Since acronyms are pronounced as words and initialisms are pronounced as letters, it would appear that “K-9” could be either one. It sounds just like “canine,” and just like the individual characters “K” and 9.”

But in our opinion, it’s technically neither acronym nor initialism.

An acronym, as we’ve written on our blog, is a word formed from elements of a longer word or phrase. But “canine” doesn’t include a “K” or a “9.”

And an initialism, as we’ve also written, is a series of letters formed from a longer word of phrase. But again, “K” and “9” aren’t part of the unabbreviated word.

We seem to be in a special category here. The “K” and the “9” merely echo sounds found in the word “canine” but don’t stand for anything resembling the longer word.

We’ve at times come across the term “pseudo-acronym,” and “K-9” might be one of those.

No dictionaries that we’ve found define “pseudo-acronym,” and there are conflicting definitions on websites. Here’s one from a paper on acronyms published by the US Department of Homeland Security:

“Pseudo-acronym: A catchall for variations and embellishments, such as creating an acronym from other acronyms (IT Acquisition Center—ITAC) or mixing abbreviations and acronyms (deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA) and ignoring words in a series just to make a pronounceable word (Princeton University Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials–PRISM), or pronouncing vowels that are not there (Guantanamo—GTMO, pronounced Gitmo) to coin a word.”

So, according to Homeland Security, you’d be on safe ground if you called “K-9” a pseudo-acronym. It’s definitely a variation or embellishment, and certainly the canines themselves won’t object.

By the way, we usually see “K-9” with a hyphen, but not always. The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, hyphenates the term on patrol cars, but usually drops the hyphen on the home page of its canine unit.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have an entry for “K-9,” but it includes the term in a citation for the noun “superintelligence.”

A Sept. 7, 1950, article in the Olean (NY) Times Herald uses the term in describing military dogs: “Super-intelligence, willingness and reliability under gunfire are requirements for the K-9 Corps.”

We found a similar use of the term in the New York Times. A Jan. 31, 1943, article describes a demonstration at the Westminster Kennel Club’s dog show “by members of the K-9 Corps—dogs now at work with the Army and Coast Guard.”

The Army’s War Dog Program, started by the Quartermaster Corps on March 13, 1942, was popularly referred to as the “K-9 Corps.”

The K-9 Corps undoubtedly helped popularize the term, though the usage was around long before the War Dog Program began.

A search of Google Books, for example, found an 1876 issue of Hallberger’s Illustrated Magazine that refers to “the various ways of rendering ‘Canine Castle,’ such as ‘K-nine Castle,’ and, better still, ‘K.9 Castle.’ ”

(Canine Castle was a kennel in London owned by Bill George, a celebrated 19th-century breeder of bulldogs.)

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Donkey’s years

Q: Recently I read the phrase “donkey’s years” in one of Lawrence Block’s books. Given the context, I assume that he was referring to a long period of time. I’d never heard of this phrase and I hope you can shed some light on its history.

A: The mystery writer Lawrence Block has used the expression several times in his works, including this example from Telling Lies for Fun & Profit (1994), a book about writing fiction:

“I don’t write many short stories these days and I haven’t perpetrated a poem in donkey’s years.”

The phrase “donkey’s years,” meaning a long time, originated in the early 20th century, apparently as a pun on the long ears of a donkey.

In fact, the first published reference in the Oxford English Dictionary uses the phrase “donkey’s ears.” Here’s the citation, from The Vermillion Box, a 1916 novel by E. V. Lucas:

“Now for my first bath for what the men call ‘Donkey’s ears,’ meaning years and years.”

It’s not certain, though, which came first: “donkey’s ears” or “donkey’s years.”

We found “donkey’s years” in another 1916 book, With Jellicoe in the North Sea, by Frank Hubert Shaw:

“This isn’t a battleship war at all; it’s a destroyer-submarine-light cruiser show. They’ll never come out in donkey’s years, not they. They know jolly well we shall scupper ’em if they so much as dare to show their noses outside the wet triangle.”

The OED defines “donkey’s years” (also “donkeys’ years”) as a colloquial usage meaning a very long time.

It describes the phrase as a “punning allusion to the length of a donkey’s ears and to the vulgar pronunciation of ears as years.”

Gary Martin’s Phrase Finder website speculates that the usage originated as rhyming slang.

In rhyming slang, the last word of a short phrase is rhymed with a word that the phrase stands for. So an expresson like “trouble and strife” (“trouble” for short) stands for “wife.”

The earliest OED citation for the actual phrase “donkey’s years” may indeed be, in the dictionary’s words, an example of “a vulgar pronunciation of ears as years.”

In Hugh Walpole’s 1927 novel Wintersmoon, Mrs. Beddoes tells Mr. Hignett about a wedding she attended:

“I was at the wedding, you know, Mr. ’Ignett, ’ad a special card all to myself, ’aving worked for Miss Janet and her sister donkey’s years.”

The most recent OED citation is from a March 19, 1961, article in the Observer: “American influence and financial participation have been strong here for donkeys’ years.”

Although we occasionally hear Americans use the expression, all of the OED citations are from British writers, and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) describes the usage as chiefly British.

We recently sighted the “y”-less version, “donkey’s ears,” in Jutland Cottage, a 1953 novel by the British writer Angela Thirkell.

In the novel, one of Thirkell’s Barsetshire books, Mr. Wickham, an estate agent, interrupts a toast by asking a fellow naval veteran, Tubby (a k a Canon Fewling), for his first name:

”Well, here’s to Horatio Nelson coupled with the name of—what the hell is your name, Tubby? I’ve known you for donkey’s ears, but we always said Tubby.”

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Why does “fridge” have a “d”?

Q: Who put the “d” in “fridge”? If it’s short for “refrigerator,” why isn’t it “frig”?

A: Although most dictionaries list “fridge” as the only spelling for this abbreviated version of “refrigerator,” a few do indeed include the “d”-less version “frig” as a variant spelling.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, has only the “fridge” spelling, while Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) includes “frig” as a variant.

Some American dictionaries describe the “frig” spelling as British, but all the British dictionaries we’ve checked (Macmillan, Collins, Longman, etc.) list only “fridge” for the short form of “refrigerator.”

Interestingly, the earliest written example for the term in the Oxford English Dictionary uses the “frig” spelling (plus an apostrophe). In fact, five of the eight OED examples spell the term without the “d” (some with and some without the apostrophe).

The first “frig” citation in Oxford is from E. F. Spanner’s 1926 novel Broken Trident: “Best part of our stuff here is chilled, and with no ’frig plant working, the mercury will climb like a rocket.”

However, a reader of the blog has informed us of earlier examples of “frig” and the plural “friges” as shortened forms of “refrigerator.”

S. Wilding Cole uses both terms several times in “The Cleansing of a Brewery,” a paper presented on March 13, 1916, at a meeting in London of the local chapter of the Institute of Brewing.

In a section on the maintenance of refrigerators, for example, Cole says “most brewers know that unless ‘friges’ and mains are kept thoroughly clean, trouble is bound to ensue.”

The earliest “fridge” cite in the OED is from Frame-Up, a 1935 crime novel by Collin Brooks: “Do you mean that you keep a dead body in a fridge waiting for the right moment to bring her out?”

The OED has examples of “frig” from as recently as 1960. Here’s one from The Quiet American, the 1955 novel by Graham Greene: “We haven’t a frig—we send out for ice.”

Although “fridge” is either the only spelling or the preferred one in the eight US or UK dictionaries we checked, a bit of googling finds that “frig” is not exactly cooling its heels today. Here are just a few of the many examples posted over the last year:

“Frig not cooling, freezer is fine” … “Looking for built-in frig with crushed ice / water dispenser” … “Frig not cold anymore. What can i do?” … “Freezer works but frig not cold” … “Freezer Semi Cold, Frig Warm.”

A similarly spelled verb, “frig,” which most dictionaries describe as vulgar slang, has more to do with heating than cooling. It means to have sexual intercourse or masturbate. (The present participle, “frigging,” is often used as an intensifier.)

How are all these frigging words pronounced? Well, the verb “frig” rhymes with “prig,” but the nouns spelled “frig” and “fridge” both rhyme with “bridge.” And “frigging” rhymes with “digging,” though it’s often spelled and pronounced friggin’.

The OED describes “fridge” as a colloquial abbreviation for “refrigerator,” a much older term that showed up in the early 1600s. It suggests that the ‘frig’ spelling may have been influenced by the brand name “Frigidaire” (a play on “frigid air”).

“Oxford, an etymological dictionary based on historical evidence, also notes that an 1886 edition of John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms includes the short form “frigerator.”

We’d add that the company now known as Frigidaire was called the Guardian Frigerator Company when it was founded in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 1916.

The company adopted the name “Frigidaire” in 1919, three years after “frig” and “friges” were used in the brewery paper cited above. So the brand name “Frigidaire” may have influenced the usage, but it couldn’t have been the source.

We can’t tell from the published examples in the OED (or some earlier ones in Google Books) who originated the “frig” and “fridge” spellings. But we can speculate about why “fridge” has become the dominant spelling.

First of all, the natural pronunciation of “fridge” matches the way the second syllable sounds in “refrigerator.”

Although “frig” is pronounced the same way as “fridge” when it means a refrigerator, the natural pronunciation of “frig” would be like that of the naughty verb we mentioned above.

Our guess is that English speakers generally prefer the “fridge” spelling because they instinctively pronounce it the way the letters f-r-i-g sound in “refrigerator.”

We’ll end with a few lines from Ray Charles’s recording of Louis Jordan’s blues hit “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town”:

“Let me tell you, honey
We gonna move away from here
I don’t need no iceman
I’m gonna get you a Frigidaire.”

[Note: This post was updated on Aug. 3, 2019.]

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Vet noire

Q: When did “vetrin” replace “veteran” and “vetrinarian” replace “veterinarian”? This drives me crazy. I hear it on NPR as well as TV news programs. I hope misusage hasn’t corrupted two perfectly good words.

A: Sorry! The title of this post doesn’t make much sense, but we couldn’t resist the pun.

As for your question, those pronunciations may drive you crazy, but they’re not incorrect. Both “veteran” and “veterinarian” have clipped alternate pronunciations that are standard English.

In each case, the word has a longer and a shorter pronunciation, and the shorter loses the second syllable.

So “veteran” can properly be pronounced as three syllables or as two. “Veterinarian” can properly be pronounced as six syllables or as five.

These pronunciations are given as standard in both The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

By the way, “veteran” and “veterinarian” sound as if they have something in common, and it turns out that they may be distantly related.

The word for an old or experienced soldier came into English in the early 16th century via the Latin adjective veteranus (old), a derivative of vetus (old).

The word for an animal doctor dates back to the mid-17th century and comes from the Latin adjective veterinarius (pertaining to cattle or beasts of burden), which in turn comes from veterinum, the noun for such an animal.

What’s the connection?

Veterinum, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, is “perhaps derived from vetus” (old). Connecting the two notions, Chambers says veterinum probably referred to “a beast one year old; possibly also, experienced, or used to work as a draft animal in plowing or pulling.”

Another source, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, speculates that “perhaps” the connection with vetus was “as if the orig. ref. was to animals past work.”

If all this is true, it may be that the original veterinarians got the name because they treated veteran—that is, old or experienced—animals.

One final aside. In case you’re interested, we wrote a post six years ago about the use of “vet” to mean examine or check out. Yes, there’s a connection.

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Robot talk

Q: I was watching a video in which Isaac Asimov pronounces “robot” as ROH-but instead of the way it’s pronounced today: ROH-bot. When did his pronunciation arise and why did it vanish?

A: Asimov’s pronunciation didn’t vanish.

We checked four American dictionaries and three of them list both ROH-bot and ROH-but as standard pronunciations of “robot.” Most British dictionaries, though, list only one pronunciation: ROH-bot.

We can’t tell you exactly when Asimov’s pronunciation of “robot” arose, but it’s not in our 1956 edition of the Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged second edition).

Webster’s Second lists two pronunciations: ROH-bot and ROB-ott. However, we haven’t seen ROB-ott in any other dictionary, including Webster’s Third.

In that YouTube video you mention, the science fiction writer discusses the Three Laws of Robotics, which were introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround”:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

However, the noun “robot” originally had nothing to do with science fiction.

The Oxford English Dictionary says it first showed up in English in the early 19th century in reference to  a “central European system of serfdom, by which a tenant’s rent was paid in forced labour or service.”

The OED’s earliest written example is from an 1839 book by John Paget about Hungary and Transylvania: “The system of rent by robot or forced labour … is a direct premium on idleness.”

However, Oxford says this sense of the word is now historical—that is, used to refer to events in the past.

The dictionary says the term was resurrected in the early 20th century in its science fiction sense: “An intelligent artificial being typically made of metal and resembling in some way a human or other animal.”

Oxford’s earliest example of the new usage is from the Oct. 10, 1922, issue of the New York Times: “A Robot that fails to raise goose flesh does dire sabotage against its dramatic inventor.”

The OED says this usage originated in the Czech writer Karel Capek’s 1921 science fiction play RUR (the title stands for Rossum’s Universal Robots). In fact, the Times citation is from a review of the English translation of the play.

Capek, at the suggestion of his brother Joseph, extracted the Czech word robot from robota (Czech for forced labor or drudgery), according to the OED.

The dictionary says the English word was soon being used figuratively to refer to a “person who acts mechanically or without emotion.”

The first OED citation for this usage is from the June 22, 1923, issue of the Westminster Gazette: “Mr. G. Bernard Shaw defined Robots as persons all of whose activities were imposed on them.”

In a few years, the word was being used to refer to a “machine capable of automatically carrying out a complex series of movements.”

The first OED example is from the Oct. 17, 1927, issue of the Syracuse (NY) Herald: “A ‘televocal’ electrical robot, which … can answer the telephone, tell the height of water in a reservoir, open doors, switch on lights and perform other mechanical services.”

Now, that’s a jack of all trades!

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Pat in NY Times on Web. 3 furor

Read Pat’s review in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review on the furor over Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. She’s reviewing The Story of Ain’t: America, Its Language, and the Most Controversial Dictionary Ever Published, by David Skinner.

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Is there a fox in the forecastle?

Q: One day recently, I was listening to a British chap talking about boating, and he used the word “forecastle. ” It struck me that the British pronunciation of “forecastle” is remarkably similar to “foxhole.” Could there be a relationship?

A: Nope, there’s no “fox” in “forecastle.” And the FOLK-s’l pronunciation, which originated among sailors, is common in the United States as well as in Britain.

British dictionaries usually list FOLK-s’l as the only pronunciation of “forecastle.” American dictionaries generally list FOLK-s’l first, followed by FOR-cass-ul.

The word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is also sometimes “written fo’c’sle, after sailors’ pronunc.”

Some standard dictionaries define “forecastle” as simply the front part of a ship, but most say it can be either the forward part of the upper deck or the area in the bow of a merchant ship where the crew lives.

The OED adds that the term once referred to a short elevated forward deck that was “raised like a castle to command the enemy’s decks,” but the dictionary says this usage is now considered obsolete.

The word entered English in the late 1400s as a combination of the prefix “fore-“ and the noun “castle.”

Why “castle”? Because a now-obsolete meaning of “castle,” according to Oxford, was “a tower or elevated structure on the deck of a ship.”

The OED’s first citation is from William Caxton’s 1490 translation of Virgil’s Aeneid: “Theyr chyeff maryner … was halfe a slepe vpon the forcastell.”

As for “foxhole,” the military term first showed up during World War I, according to published references in the dictionary.

The first citation is from an April 29, 1919, article in the Red Cross Magazine: “The bitter weeks of the Argonne when the same Yank lay hungry, cold, wet, and exhausted in some insufficient fox-hole.”

The dictionary defines the term as “a hole in the ground used by a soldier for protection; a slit trench.”

However, the OED has citations dating back to around 950 for the term (foxes holo in Old English) used literally to mean “an excavation made in the ground for habitation by an animal, as the fox or badger.”

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Name calling

Q: I was listening to a podcast that included comments about the former National Review columnist John Derbyshire. One person pronounced the surname DAH-bi-shuh (like the English county) but two others pronounced it DAR-bee-shir. Any comment?

A: The pronunciation of a personal name is up to the person who wears it. John Derbyshire, the former National Review columnist, could pronounce his name “Dosher” and be within his rights.

The correct way to say a person’s name is—within reason—the way he says it himself. So if someone named Jones pronounces it “Johns,” then “Johns” it is (in speech, anyway).

(The Monty Python boys went a bit overboard, though, in pronouncing the name “Luxury Yacht” as Throatwobbler Mangrove.)

There’s no rule that a personal name must be pronounced like a similarly spelled geographic term.

However, John Derbyshire, an American citizen who was born in Britain, does pronounce his last name like the county in England. And when pronounced in modern British speech, with its characteristic dropping of r’s, it sounds like “Dobbyshuh.”

In a column on Taki’s Magazine, Derbyshire renders the pronunciation of his name this way: DAH-bi-shuh.

But let’s not be silly. You can’t expect American commentators to speak with British accents. That would be taking Mr. Derbyshire’s personal preference too far.

Americans pronounce their r’s, so an American would naturally say DER-bee-shur or DAR-bee-shur or DAR-bee-shir or DER-bee-shir. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged, lists all those pronunciations.

And as a historical note, we might add that the r’s in words like “Derbyshire” were not always dropped in British speech.

Before the American Revolution, the British pronounced their r’s pretty much the way Americans do today, as we’ve written on our blog in 2008 and in 2012.

So in pronouncing the r’s in Derbyshire, Americans are simply retaining a feature of earlier British speech.

If you’d like to read more about pronouncing names, we touched on the subject in a posting in 2009 about the pronunciation of foreign words. And we wrote a blog item in 2007 about the pronunciation of names ending in “stein.”

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Enough said

Q: Enough is enough. Why do I hear “enough of” all the time? To me, the “of” is unnecessary. Maybe it’s just my ear, but I find this grating.

A: All these usages are correct:

(1) “Is there enough?” Here, “enough” is a pronoun meaning “an adequate amount.”

(2) “Is there enough milk?” Here, “enough” is an adjective meaning “sufficient.”

(3) “Is there enough of the milk?” Here, “enough” is a pronoun, followed by a prepositional phrase, “of the milk.” The phrase answers the question “enough of what?”

So both “enough milk” and “enough of the milk” are correct English. They merely represent different grammatical constructions. You might regard “of the” as unnecessary, but it’s not incorrect.

 “Enough!” can also be an interjection expressing impatience or exasperation. And it can be an adverb, as in “Is the milk fresh enough?” Here it’s an adverb modifying the adjective “fresh.”

By the way, the expression “enough is enough” is hundreds of years old, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The earliest citation is from a 1546 proverb collection by John Heywood.

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms defines the expression this way: “One should be satisfied; stop, there should be no more.”

The word “enough” itself is much older, dating back to Anglo-Saxon times. In Old English, according to the OED, it was genog.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins traces “enough” from Old English back to the prehistoric Germanic ganogaz and the Indo-European root nak-, “whose underlying meaning is probably ‘reach, attain.’ ”

Why, you may ask, is the “gh” at the end of “enough” pronounced like “f”?

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the “gh” here was once pronounced like the “ch” in the Scottish loch and the German ach. Although the pronunciation shifted over the years to the “f” of “off,” the “gh” survived.

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Why UK singers sound American

Q: Could you please explain why British pop stars seem (at least to me) to have American accents when singing?

A: We’ve noticed this too. It seems that unless they’re deliberately trying to maintain their regional accents, all pop music singers sound American when they sing in English.

The Swedish group ABBA is a good example. The members speak English with Swedish accents. But when they sing, their accents disappear and they sound like Americans.

The same is true of the classic British rock stars.

While the Beatles did give certain words a Liverpool twang, the overall impression is that we’re listening to Americans. And you can’t tell from their singing voices that Mick Jagger, Elton John, and Rod Stewart all grew up in or near London.

To use a more current example, when you hear the singer Adele perform, you’d never think she speaks with an extremely heavy cockney accent.

In performance, all these singers sound American.

There are several reasons for this. When people sing, their regional accents are obliterated by physiology, phonetics, and the music itself.

In effect, their accents are neutralized. And if they sound American, that’s because the general American accent is fairly neutral itself.

We notice people’s accents more easily when they’re speaking at a normal speed. But singing is not done at normal speed; it’s slower. And it’s also more powerful.

William O. Beeman, a linguist and the chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Minnesota, and Audrey Stottler, a voice teacher at the MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis—discussed the physiology of all this in a 2010 television interview.

As they explained, the air pressure used to make sounds is much greater when we sing, and the air passages open up and become larger. So the sound quality is very different.

The result is that when we sing, syllables are longer, vowels get stretched out, and stresses fall differently than in speech. In effect, regional accents disappear.

The linguist David Crystal, writing about this process on his blog, says melody cancels out the intonations of speech, the beat of the music cancels the rhythms of speech, and singers are forced to accent syllables as they’re accented in the music.

And as all singers know, the music forces them to elongate their vowels. A vowel that falls on a sustained note has to be drawn out more than it would be in ordinary speech.

Another effect is that diphthongs in speech are lost in singing.

Take the word “no,” which in British-accented speech has a diphthong (it sounds like “neh-ow”). That diphthong would be difficult to sing, so it becomes more of a neutral, American-sounding “noh.”

What all this adds up to is that in singing, regional accents tend to flatten out. The sounds becomes more neutral or homogeneous, and in fact similar to what a general American accent sounds like.

(In fact, Americans’ accents are flattened when they sing too. The r’s become less sharp and the pronoun “I” is often flattened to more of an “ah.”)

Crystal believes some singers in the UK today are deliberately avoiding an “American” sound and inserting regional accents into their singing.

“It’s perfectly possible for singers to retain an individual accent, if they want to, and many do,” he writes.

But even so, he adds, “in hardly any case do singers use a consistent regional accent throughout the whole song. Mixed accents seem to be the norm.”

Crystal also says that imitation may also play a role when UK singers sound “American,” but not everyone agrees that imitation is involved.

Not much academic research has published on the subject. But one study is available.

Andy Gibson, a New Zealand researcher who studies the sociolinguistics of performance, has concluded that pop singers sound American because it’s easier and more natural to sing with a neutral accent—call it American if you want.

His study, conducted in 2010, found that singers in New Zealand spoke certain words with a distinct “Kiwi” accent, but sang those same words just as Americans would.

Gibson showed that this wasn’t deliberate imitation, as had been suggested previously. The subjects of his study said they didn’t perceive any difference in their speaking and singing voices. They felt they were singing naturally.

Gibson concluded that the sound was automatic—the default accent when singing pop songs. The more neutral, American-sounding accent is simply easier and more natural to sing, he found.

That means that a regional accent will disappear in pop music—unless it’s the deliberate accent of a certain style, as in rap and hip-hop (African-American), Country-Western music (Southern), and reggae (Caribbean).

In the ’60s and ’70s, some British rock groups were accused of deliberately imitating American pop singers. But if Gibson is right, then the reverse is true—British singers have to make a deliberate effort to sound British.

For example, in 1965 the British group Herman’s Hermits recorded two heavily accented songs. The lead singer, Peter Noone, is from Manchester, but in these two songs he affected an exaggerated cockney accent. The songs were aimed at the American market, then in the grip of the so-called “British Invasion” rock movement.

The songs, “I’m Henery the Eighth, I Am” and “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” both became No. 1 hits in the US. But they weren’t even released as singles in Britain.

The relationship between song and speech, music and language, is still being explored. It’s been suggested that perhaps different parts of the brain are involved, since speech impediments (like stuttering or Tourette’s syndrome) often disappear when someone sings.

Of course, people remarked on the homogeneity of singing long before rock-‘n’-roll. In the Oct. 1, 1932, issue of the Music Educators Journal, the author T. Campbell Young wrote: 

“It is true that the spoken word varies considerably, as the many dialects which are found among the English-speaking nations will prove.  It is equally true to say that language, in song, has been standardized to such an extent that it has become universal and homogeneous. It follows naturally that when words and music are allied, the former must be pronounced in such as way as to conform with the accepted principles of good singing.”

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Culinary arts

Q: Why is the first syllable of “culinary” pronounced  “cull” in the US? I thought words starting with “cu,” a consonant, and “i” have a “cue” sound: “cuticle,” “cupid,” etc. Is this more Americanization of the English language? It may be ACCEPTED now, but that doesn’t make it CORRECT.

A: In American usage, “culinary” has two acceptable pronunciations—KUL-inary and KYOO-linary, according to standard dictionaries in the US.

This is nothing new, since our 1956 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (2nd ed., unabridged) gives the same two pronunciations.

And it’s not an example of “Americanization” either. On the contrary!

In standard British speech, the first syllable is pronounced only one way—KUL. (We consulted the British online editions of the Cambridge, Collins, and Macmillan dictionaries.)

So if anybody introduced the “cue” into “culinary,” it was the Americans, not the British.

It’s true that many words starting with “cu” plus a consonant and “i” are invariably pronounced as if they started with “cue” (as in “cubic”). But this is not universal, since some words don’t fit that pattern.

Another culinary exception is “cumin,” which we’ve written about before on our blog.

Until fairly recently, as we say in that post, KUM-in was regarded as the only correct pronunciation of “cumin” in American English

Sometime in the latter half of the 20th century, new pronunciations became accepted in the US. Today it can be pronounced KUM-in, KOO-min, or KYOO-min.

When we say that a variant spelling or pronunciation is “accepted,” that means it’s correct in the eyes of lexicographers. In other words, it’s standard English.

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Did the Bard speak American?

Q: I tuned in late to the discussion on WNYC about Elizabethan English, but did Pat really say Shakespeare spoke like an American? How does she know what he sounded like? I didn’t realize Francis Bacon had invented the tape recorder.

A: The short answer is that Shakespeare didn’t sound just like an American, but the English in Shakespearean times was probably more NBC than BBC.

We know what Shakespeare might have sounded like because linguists have reconstructed the sounds of Elizabethan speech (we’ll soon explain how), and it’s very different from the standard modern British accent, known as Received Pronunciation.

This isn’t as startling as it sounds. We’ve written before on our blog about the fact that the familiar characteristics of the modern British accent developed relatively recently, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

It was after the American Revolution that the British began using the broad a (as in PAHST for “past”), dropping their r’s (as in FAH for “far”), and losing syllables (saying SEC-ruh-tree for “secretary,” NESS-a-sree for “necessary”), and so on.

Meanwhile, colonists in North America retained many features of pre-Revolutionary British speech.

We know this because people wrote about these changes at the time they were happening—in books on speech and elocution, in articles in contemporary newspapers and journals, in pronouncing dictionaries, and so on.

Now, as Pat said on WNYC the other day, there’s been a revival of interest in reconstructing the sounds of British speech as it was even further back, at the dawn of the Early Modern English period.

This was around 1600, Shakespeare’s time, and it’s appropriate that this new interest in period speech was inspired by a project at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.

The Globe, which was reconstructed in 1997, mounted a production of Romeo and Juliet in 2004 with the actors speaking as they would have in Shakespeare’s day.

Since then, other theaters, directors, and acting companies have joined with language experts and become interested in what’s known as Original Pronunciation.

Several productions have been mounted in Britain and the United States, and an Off Broadway production of Macbeth will be announced later this fall.

The examples of Elizabethan speech that were played during Pat’s appearance on WNYC came from a new CD, Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation, produced by the British Library and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

To our ears, the actors’ accent sounds like a mix of American and Irish English, with a little Aussie thrown in.

How do scholars know what English sounded like circa 1600? As it happens, there’s plenty of evidence to go on.

For one thing, groundbreaking work had already been done in this area back in the 1950s.

There have been at least two  previous studies of Original Pronunciation, one in the UK by John Barton of Cambridge, and one in the US by Helge Kökeritz at Yale. Kökeritz in fact made the first systematic attempt to identify the Elizabethan sound system, according to several sources.

In a booklet that comes with the British Library CD, the linguist David Crystal explains much of the scholarship that has gone into the reconstruction of these sounds.

First, contemporary authors wrote commentaries on the pronunciation of their day.

Ben Jonson, for instance, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a book on grammar in which he discussed the proper sounding of r after a vowel, as in “far” and “heart.” He described it as “growly.”

Second, we have the evidence of the spellings Shakespeare used. In those days, spelling was not yet standardized, and people spelled words as they sounded to them.

Shakespeare originally spelled the word “film” (meaning a membrane) as “philom”—so it would have had two syllables, “fillum.” As we know, that’s the pronunciation of “film” used by the Irish today.

Third, there are the rhythms, puns, and rhymes Shakespeare used, many of which don’t quite work in modern English—either British or American.

When we hear some of these passages recited in Original Pronunciation, we can appreciate many of the puns and rhymes that Shakespeare intended.

For instance, in King Henry IV, Part I, Prince Hal demands proof of some story Falstaff has just told, and asks him his reasons. Falstaff says, “If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.”

Why “as plentiful as blackberries”? Well, there’s a pun there, but it’s missed in modern English. When you listen to that same passage in Original Pronunciation, the pun becomes apparent, because the word “reason” was pronounced “raisin”—“If raisins were as plentiful as blackberries.…”

Many Shakespearean puns that are missed in modern English are naughty ones, since the words “lines” and “loins” sound the same in Original Pronunciation, as do “hour” and “whore.”

The difference that pronunciation has on rhymes is astonishing, too.

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, and two-thirds of them have rhymes that don’t work in today’s English, according to Crystal. But in Original Pronunciation, we’re able to hear them as the Elizabethans did.

To mention just one example, the last lines of Sonnet 116 read: “If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

In modern English, “proved” and “loved” don’t rhyme. But in Original Pronunciation, they do. They sound like “pruvved” and “luvved,” though even that spelling doesn’t quite get the sound across. There’s a hint of ”oo” in that vowel.

In listening to the recording, we noticed many other important differences between RP (modern Received Pronunciation) and OP (Original Pronunciation). A lot of the OP sounds would be familiar to American ears.

The words “bath” and “France,” for example, sound in OP much as they do today in the US; the a vowel is flat, instead of broad (“ah”).

And in OP we hear the r sounds in “far,” “star,” “return,” “wherefore,” and “world” (which sounds like a cross between “whirled” and “whorled”; in RP it sounds like WULD).

In OP, we can clearly hear both the r and the t in “fortune.” It comes out like FOR-tun. Today, in American English it’s pronounced FOR-chun, while in RP it sounds like FOH-tyoon.

In Elizabethan speech, linguists say, you can find traces of all the modern accents of English. On the CD, you’ll hear sounds of the English spoken today in America, Australia, Wales, Ireland, and the West Country of Britain.

No one’s suggesting that from now on, all Shakespeare should be done in Original Pronunciation. But since many productions boast of authentic period clothing, music, instruments, and so on, it’s valuable that we now can have period speech as well.

As for your comment about Bacon, no, he certainly didn’t invent the tape recorder. But he was the first person to use the adjective “electric” in writing, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Bacon used the term around 1626 to describe a substance, like amber, capable of developing static electricity when rubbed.

However, Thomas Browne is credited with first using the adjective (spelled “electrick”) as well as the noun “electricity” in its modern sense, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a 1646 book debunking myths about science.

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Etymology Linguistics Pronunciation Spelling Usage

Vowel mouthed

Q: My boyfriend and I were sitting on my balcony, perhaps drinking too much, when the talk turned to vowels. At some point, he said, “a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y and w.” ALL I said was this: “I learned only y. I never heard w called a vowel.” Before long, we were hurling insults at each other’s schools (mine in Iowa and his in New Jersey). Now I’m beginning to wonder if my mind is playing tricks on me. So here’s my question: Pat is from Iowa. Did she learn her vowels with just y or with y and w?

A: Some people learned that old school jingle with just “y,” some with both “y” and “w,” and some without either one.

When Pat was going to elementary school in Iowa in the ’50s, she learned that the vowels were “a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes w and y.” When Stewart was learning his vowels in New York in the ’40s, he learned just “a, e, i, o, u.”

Five years ago, we ran a brief entry on “w” and “y” as vowels. To make a long story short, they’re generally consonants at the beginning of a syllable and vowels at the end. They’re also vowels when they’re part of a diphthong, as in “boy” or “cow.”

Writers on language have singled out “w” and “y” as special cases since at least as far back as the late 1700s.

This is from A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language, by the influential 18th-century lexicographer John Walker: “The vowels are, a, e, i, o, u; and y and w when ending a syllable. The consonants are, b, c, d, f, [etc.] …; and y and w when beginning a syllable.”

Walker also says two vowels forming one syllable are a diphthong, three are a triphthong. His examples include the “aw” in “law”; the “ay” in “say”; the “ew” in “jewel”; the “ey” in “they”; the “ow” in “now”; the “oy” in “boy”; the “uy” in “buy”; the word “aye”; and the “iew” in “view.”

After discussing “w” and “y,” he concludes: “Thus we find, that the common opinion, with respect to the double capacity of these letters, is perfectly just.”

We quoted from a 1797 edition of Walker’s book, first published in 1791 and widely reprinted throughout the 19th century.

We also found several mid-19th-century books that describe “y” and “w” variously as “vowel consonants” or as letters that unite or straddle the two categories.

But whatever you were told in school, the subject of what we call consonants and what we call vowels is very slippery and often misleading.

Sometimes, as with “say” and “now,” the “y” and “w” are vowels. But in some other words they’re obviously consonants, even though their sounds could be respelled with a pair of vowels.

For example, the name “Danielle” is sometimes spelled “Danyel.” In the traditional spelling, “ie” is a vowel cluster. Yet in the alternate spelling, “y” is a consonant, since it’s a hard or voiced “y” as in “yellow.” Same sound, different symbols, different labels (vowel vs. consonant).

And to use a “w” example, the French oui and the English “we” sound alike, yet “ou” is a consonant cluster while the “w” in “we” is clearly a consonant, as in “well.” Again, same sound, different symbols, different labels.

As you can see, the “vowel” vs. “consonant” labels sometimes break down when applied to spellings.

You might even argue that “y” and “w” are always diphthongs to some degree or other, since even when they’re consonants at the beginning of a syllable—as in “yet” and “wet”—they’re still combinations of vowel sounds (“ee-eh” and “oo-eh”).

At many points, the old categories let us down and stop being useful. This is more apparent now than when we were kids, because scholars of linguistics and phonology have developed more sophisticated ways of looking at our sound/spelling systems.

A “vowel” is a kind of sound, or the letter that represents it. Similarly, a “consonant” is a kind of sound, or the letter that represents it. If a particular letter can represent either kind of sound, then it can be both a vowel and a consonant.

Here’s what the linguists Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum write in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language:

“The categories vowel and consonant are defined in terms of speech. Vowels have unimpeded airflow through the throat and mouth, while consonants employ a significant constriction of the airflow somewhere in the oral tract (between the vocal cords and the lips).”

Thus, they write, “we do not follow the traditional practice of simply dividing the alphabet into five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and twenty-one consonants.” This traditional classification, they say, “does not provide a satisfactory basis for describing the spelling alternations in English morphology.”

The authors don’t even use the terms “vowel” and “consonant” alone in referring to writing. For example, they describe y as a “vowel letter in fully,” as a “consonant letter in yes,” and as “just part of a composite vowel symbol in boy.”

They describe u as a “vowel letter in fun,” as a “consonant letter in quick,” and as “part of a composite symbol in mouth.”

And “y,” “w,” and “u” aren’t the only in-between letters. “H” is a consonant in “heavy” but a vowel in “dahlia.”

In his book American English Spelling (1988), Donald Wayne Cummings summarizes the situation this way:

“Thus we get the following categories: (1) letters that are always vowels (a, e, i, and o); (2) letters that are sometimes consonants but usually vowels (u and y); letters that are sometimes vowels but usually consonants (h and w); and (4) letters that are always consonants (b, c, d, f, g, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, x, and z).”

So in the grand scheme of things, it’s hardly worth it for you and your boyfriend to throw insults at each other over vowel language. Still, we’ve had some pretty silly language arguments too, ones that you’d probably find pointless.

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Etymology Pronunciation Usage

Waste matter

Q: I heard a speaker on NPR pronounce “detritus” as DEH-tri-tus. He appeared to be an educated, native speaker of American English. Perhaps he was influenced by “detriment.” My admittedly out-of-date M-W 10th shows only one pronunciation.

A: “So to Speak,” the pronunciation chapter in the third edition of Pat’s grammar and usage book Woe Is I, also gives only one way to say “detritus”:

“Stress the middle syllable (de-TRY-tus). Hacker’s salamander buried itself in the detritus at the bottom of the pond.”

You’ll find the same thing in the Oxford English Dictionary—without the salamander—as well as in the latest versions of the two standard dictionaries we consult the most: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Perhaps you’re right, and this mispronunciation was influenced by “detriment,” which is stressed on the first syllable.

As it happens, “detritus” and “detriment” are related. They have a common ancestor in the Latin verb deterere (to rub away, wear down, impair). But we can go back even further to that Latin verb’s parent, terere (to rub), the source of “attrition” and “trite.”

The older of the two words, “detriment” (meaning loss or damage), was first recorded sometime before 1440. As the OED says, it entered English through French (détriment, from the Latin noun detrimentum).

“Detritus” came along some 350 years later, borrowed directly from the Latin detritus (rubbing away). It was originally a term in physical geography describing an action—the “wearing away or down by detrition, disintegration, decomposition,” the OED says.

Its first appearance in writing is from James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795): “Such materials as might come from the detritus of granite.”

But that usage has since become obsolete. In the early 19th century, people began using “detritus” to mean the matter produced by the wearing away. And by mid-century, “detritus” came to mean debris in general, or any kind of waste or disintegrated material.

This newer sense of the word may be “etymologically improper” (to use the OED’s words), but it hasn’t been detrimental to the language.

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Heat treatment

Q: I’ve lived in Astoria, Queens, all my life—I was born there—and I pronounce “radiator” with a short “a” like the one in “fad.” I was well into my teens when I realized this wasn’t the common pronunciation. (I never made the connection between “radiate” and “radiator.”) I’ve been told that my pronunciation is unique to Queens. Is this true?

A: No, the pronunciation of “radiator” as RAH-dee-ay-ter (rhymes with “gladiator”) is not unique to Queens.

It’s not very common, though. Stewart (an ex-New Yorker) is familiar with it, while Pat (an ex-Iowan) can’t remember ever hearing it.

We’ve checked a half-dozen dictionaries and all of them say the standard American pronunciation is RAY-dee-ay-ter. The British pronounce it pretty much the same way, though they tend to drop the final “r.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) is the only standard dictionary we’ve found that mentions the RAH-dee-ay-ter pronunciation, but M-W describes it as dialect that’s not considered standard.

So where is your pronunciation of “radiator” heard aside from the New York City borough of Queens?

The Dictionary of American Regional English says the RAH pronunciation of the first syllable is especially heard in Pennsylvania.

Contributors to DARE have reported hearing it in Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and various areas in southeastern and central southern Pennsylvania.

DARE cites this excerpt from a 1971 letter to the Today Show: “I have found a very reliable indicator of someone from the Philadelphia area is how a person pronounces the first ‘a’ in radiator as though it were the first ‘a’ in radical.”

And what does DARE have to tell us about the pronunciation in Queens?

The dictionary’s most recent citation, from 2001, says: “Radiator—NYC and environs, the 1st a is pronounced as in fat.”

In case you’re curious, the noun “radiator” showed up in English in the early 1800s, but the first citations used the word in the sense of material (like glass or metal) that “radiates heat, light, or any other form of energy.”

The word, which ultimately comes from the Latin radiare (to emit rays or to shine), didn’t come to mean a device for heating a room until 1838, according to citations in the OED.

The first example of this usage, from the Daily Whig & Courier in Bangor, Maine, refers to “an apparatus called a radiator, which … has an effect in absorbing and distributing the heat equal to that of a very long pipe.”

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Etymology Pronunciation

Spicy language

Q: Does anyone anywhere pronounce the first “r” n turmeric?

A: We’ve written before about the pronunciations of “basil” and “cumin,” but until now nobody has asked us about “turmeric.”

As it happens, you can correctly pronounce “turmeric” either with or without sounding that first “r”: TUR-mer-ik or TOO-mer-ik.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) gives both as standard pronunciations. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) gives those two plus a third, whose first syllable sounds like TYOO.

Turmeric, a spice made from the powdered rhizome of an East Indian plant (Curcuma longa), is an important ingredient in curry powder. The crushed rhizome is also used in yellow dyes.

At our house, we use curry quite a bit, but we don’t often have occasion to use turmeric by itself so it doesn’t come up much in conversation. We had to stop and think how we pronounce it (Stewart doesn’t say it at all; Pat says TOO-mer-ik).

The etymology of “turmeric” is obscure, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. It doesn’t help that similar words have been used for a tree and for the powdered roots of other plants.

Since the word came into English in the mid-16th century, it’s been spelled all kinds of ways (“tamaret,” “tormarith,” “turmerocke,” “tarmanick,” “tarmaluk”). The final “t” in the earliest English spellings eventually became “k” or “c.”

The earliest spellings, the OED says, “resemble a recorded French terre mérite and medieval or modern Latin terra merita ‘deserving or deserved earth.’ ”

The dictionary notes that the 19th-century French lexicographer Émile Littré said the powder was known by the Latin or French name in commerce. However, Oxford adds, “The reason and origin of this Latin and French appellation are obscure.”

The OED dismisses one theory of the origin: ”Some have suggested a corruption of the Persian-Arabic name kurkum ‘saffron,’ whence Latin curcuma, French curcuma, and Spanish curcuma; but the change seems too unlikely.”

Now that you’ve called our attention to turmeric, we think we’ll have some curried shrimp tonight.

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Pronunciation

How erudite is your pronunciation?

Q: Why do so many people mispronounce “erudite” as ER-yuh-dite instead of the proper ER-uh-dite? And what does that have to say about their erudition?

A: Both ER-yuh-dite and ER-uh-dite are standard American pronunciations for “erudite.” In fact, Stewart uses the first one and Pat the second. (No, they won’t call the whole thing off.)

Both pronunciations are listed without comment in the two US dictionaries we consult the most, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

Interestingly, the Cambridge Dictionaries Online website lists ER-uh-dite as the British pronunciation and ER-yuh-dite as the American.

The adjective “erudite” is derived from the Latin verb erudire (to instruct or train). The verb combines e (out) with rudis (rude or untrained).

In fact “erudite” meant trained or well-instructed when it entered English in the 1400s, but that sense of the word is now considered obsolete or archaic, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The noun “erudition,” which entered English around the same time, meant training or instructing, but the OED says that sense is now obsolete too.

Today, as you know, “erudition” means great knowledge, and “erudite” means having such knowledge.

As for your question, it’s OK for an American to use either pronunciation. And it’s OK to have strong feelings about one or the other.

Pat, for example, thinks Stewart’s pronunciation of “erudite” is overly erudite. It reminds her of postings we’ve written about the pronunciation of “news” as NYOOZE and “Tuesday” as CHYOOZ-day.

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Windows update

Q: My friends often laugh when I say the word “windows,” for I pronounce it WIN-diz (as if it rhymed with “whiz”). I grew up in and around NYC. So the question is, where did I get that pronunciation?

A: The standard US pronunciation of “window” is WIN-doh, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.).

The plural “windows” would be pronounced WIN-doze. We can’t find any standard dictionary in the US or the UK that mentions WIN-diz as a variant pronunciation of “windows.”

But pronunciation isn’t mathematics. Just about everybody varies a bit in pronouncing some word or other.

That’s why it’s taken programmers so long to develop decent speech-recognition software. And even the best programs still screw up once in a while.

Interestingly, American Heritage has an entry for “winder” (pronounced WIN-dur) as an upper Southern US variant of “window.” The plural would be pronounced WIN-durz, somewhat similar to your WIN-diz.

AH also mentions “winder” in a regional usage note accompanying its entry for “holler” used as a variant of “hollow.”

One feature of upper Southern US English, especially Appalachian English, the dictionary says, is the “pronunciation of the final unstressed syllable in words such as hollow, window, and potato” as “ur.”

“Holler, winder, and tater are merely variant pronunciations reflected in spelling,” AH adds. “As a noun, holler has the specific meaning in the Appalachians of ‘a small valley between mountains’: They live up in the holler underneath Big Bald Mountain.”

The Dictionary of American Regional English says the WIN-dur pronunciation has also been heard in the Northeast, and it cites “sporadic instances” in western New York. We’ve also read of it in Rhode Island and southern coastal Massachusetts.

That’s getting close, but we don’t recall hearing “windows” pronounced as WIN-diz in the New York metropolitan area. (We recently discussed the New York accent on our blog.)

However, we’ve often seen “Windows” spelled “Windiz” in references (usually critical) to Microsoft’s operating systems.

WindizUpdate, for instance, is an alternative, Web-based software update service for Windows. And another program, WinDiz, lets you browse zip-file archives.

The word “window,” by the way has an interesting history. Here’s an etymology note from American Heritage (we’ll break it up into paragraphs for readability):

“The source of our word window is a vivid metaphor. Window comes to us from the Scandinavian invaders and settlers of England in the early Middle Ages.

“Although we have no record of the exact word they gave us, it was related to Old Norse vindauga, ‘window,’ a compound made up of vindr, ‘wind,’ and auga, ‘eye,’ reflecting the fact that at one time windows contained no glass.

“The metaphor ‘wind eye’ is of a type beloved by Norse and Old English poets and is called a kenning; other examples include oar-steed for ‘ship’ and whale-road for ‘sea.’

“Recently we have restored to the 800-year-old word window a touch of its poetic heritage, using it figuratively in such phrases as launch window, weather window, and window of opportunity or vulnerability.”

(Speaking of metaphors, expressions like those remind us of an old proverb: “The eyes are the windows of the soul.”)

Sorry we can’t be more definitive about the source of your pronunciation of “windows,” but we hope you find this effort to answer you eye-opening.

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