Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

Andrew John (no I didn’t reverse his names) responded to our Good Word snarl with this thought:

“In NZ the word snarler does not usually mean something that snarls. In my experience when Kiwis use the word snarler they mean a sausage, particularly when it is on a BBQ. Which makes me wonder if its use is derived from hot-dog?”

My response:

A snarler usually refers to a dog (or human) that snarls. Could the transfer of this sense of “dog” to “hotdog” be justified? Or is it more likely that, because they tend to curl when heated, they seem to become entangled?

There is also another sense of snarl used in metal-working. A snarling-iron is used to “raise up the projecting part”. Whether this is used for curling or not, I don’t know. (I’m not metal worker.)

Does anyone out there know what a “snarling-iron” does?

We received two responses to our Good Word tucker back in mid-December that fell between the cracks until now. Brian Peretti wrote, “Just an addition to the tucker post. My mother was from West Virginia, and she would use the phrase: “best bib and tucker”, as in, “We’re goin’ to church, so put on your best bib and tucker” (otherwise known as your Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes).”

Well, Brian, both these expressions were prevalent in North Carolina when I was growing up and I’ll bet they are still in use today, at least among the older population. In fact, “bib and tucker” was used in England as early as 1747, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, so the use must have been wide-spread at one time. A bib is the front of a false shirt and a tucker was one you tucked into your pants. Originally referred to a lace front that women wore, but later on came to refer to the false-front shirts men wore as well.

Graham Thomas then wrote from South Africa:

“Regarding you comments today about tucker, I was born in South Africa of British heritage, and we often used the work tuck to refer to food and the shop supplying food at school was referred to as a tuck shop. So I think that the reference to it being uniquely used in Australia is a bit misleading. It does sounds that it could have originated in England with the two countries common heritage.”

It seems I underestimated the both the geographic and the semantic extent to which tucker is currently used. The word was printed in a London newspaper in 1858, so it must have been current was before that. However, as the citations in the Oxford English Dictionary make clear, it continued to be used only in Australia and New Zealand—and South Africa, as you write. It was never prevalent in the US or Canada nor England after the mid-19th century.

Rudy Marinacci recently wrote:

“I enjoyed your ‘How is a Hippo like a Feather‘ article and chart very much. Could you tell me why my mother and her brother, both from Southern Italy (Reggio Calabria) could not pronounce ‘th’ and said tin iunstead of thin and tick, not thick?”

Sure can. It is because [th] is more difficult to pronounce than other English linguistic sounds. It is an “interdental” sound, which means the tongue goes between the teeth to pronounce it. It is relatively more difficult to get your tongue in between your teeth and out again before the following vowel.

The pronunciation of [t] is not that far away. It is a dental, which means the tongue goes to just behind the upper teeth to pronounce it. Much easier. The tongue remains where it is in pronouncing all other linguistic sounds (phonemes): behind the teeth. This is why people from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Deep South make the same sound change.

There is another problem your mother faces: she gets no help from Italian. This is because there simply is no [th] in Italian. In fact, this sound does not appear in any Romance languages. (Diego is right about the difference between English [th] and the Spanish dental fricative.)

Don’t worry about your mother’s pronunciation. As I said above, people from Brooklyn, Queens, and throughout the rural regions of the South (where I come from) face the same problem. She is in the company of native speakers of English around the world.

I heard someone say this morning, “Alls I want is a standing order.” This misspeak is spreading like grass fire. I began hearing it in the 80s, too, but the instances were few and far between. It was mostly the locals on staff but I heard a few students say it, too. I quickly corrected them in a threatening voice.

We can’t be sure if it is alls (plural) or all’s (contraction). I can’t think of a grammatical function word that ends on an S that is so frequently used with all that it would form a contraction with it. All that and all are are frequently heard together, but a contraction with these words would produce all’t and all’re, respectively.

So we are forced back to my first hypothese—unless there is a third one. All are is a plural construction but most words occurring before are end on an S. So, for consistency, an S is added to all.

Do you have a better idea?

Here is a mystery. I received a message from Stefani O’daniel today that contained this complaint:

“Please tell me if I am right or wrong. I hate didn’t pronounced [diddent], not [didnt], wouldn’t pronounced [wooddent] not [woodnt], and couldn’t pronounced [kooddent] not [koodnt]. Which is right?”

“I’ve heard these words pronounced this way for the past 30 years now and iits irritating. I was told the words are pronounced this way because that is the correct pronunciation.”

I became aware of my students using these pronunciations in the 80s. Where it came from, I cannot say but I’m very suspicious of California, Valley Speak, so to speak.

N in the English language now can be pronounced as a vowel when occurring between consonants. The schwa (UH or on this website [ê]) has disappeared from the language before N between consonants. The tongue does not move between the D and the N in these words.

The T [t] is disappearing, too, in rapid speech. So the pronunciation of these words are reduced in fast speech to didn, wouldn, couldn. Now, we approaching the point where there is very little to distinguish did from didn’t, etc.

I suspect the pronunciation that so irritates you is spreading because it more clearly distinguishes the negative forms of these words from the positive. Also, it is possible that some young speakers of English don’t realize that these words are contractions involvingi not.

There is no right or wrong about this; it is normal cross-generational language change. It annoys me, too, but even more annoying is the misspelling it encourages: didn’t spelled diddent occurs 150,000 times on the Web.

“Dave” recently wrote:

“I just read your article ‘Bad Grammar or Language Change’ and wanted to let you know that I found a grammatical error in your article.“

“In the sentence ‘the number of suffixes for marking grammatical functions like number, person, tense, are disappearing faster than frogs’, the subject of the sentence is number. This singular noun does not agree with the verb in the sentence are. What is most curious to me is that the subject of nouns and verbs not agreeing is discussed only a few paragraphs above this sentence”.

Thanks for the edit. I have to say, in my own defense, that this is not an uncommon error. It comes from the fact that English speakers are losing their grasp of subject and object due to the loss of case endings. At least that is my opinion.

Kay Bock of the University of Illinois (a former student of mine) disagrees. She is trying to find a grammatical pattern among these mistakes. We coauthored a paper on the subject, where I was asked only to provide data for Russian.

What happens when speakers lose control of the subject – object distinction but not verb agreement? Well, one thing is that they rely on the noun nearest the verb to reflect agreement. That is how I compensated, along with the vast majority of US speakers.

Another way is to resort to semantics: if the subject noun refers to a group, then agreement is plural. If it refers to a single item, singular. That is the British solution. They say things like “the parliament are”, “the team are” but the “player is”, “the lamp is”.

Both these approaches are temporary. We are all waiting for the -s which distinguishes 3rd singular verbs from 3rd plural to fall by the wayside. That will solve everything.

My treatment of the adjective camp obviously caught Doug Schulek-Miller off guard. I thought his reaction worth sharing:

My children go to camp in the summer (and there is nothing homosexual  or kitsch about them!)

• I made a camp in the forest when we stayed outdoors.
• I camped on my neighbour’s doorstep so that I wouldn’t miss him.

I am confused, as I understand you will likely get a lot of other responses like this despite noting that you are talking an adjectival sense.

Apoplectically yours,
Doug

The same word reminded Harry Murphy how folks down East in Maine use the noun camp a bit different from the way it is used farther south:

Your recent description of “camp” as an adjective neglected “camp” as a noun.  As an expatriate from Maine, I prefer to think of “camp” as a noun.

In his “Maine Lingo”, John Gould defines “camp” this way:  “CAMP:  The general word in Maine for a wilderness dwelling, no matter how elegant.  It can be a one-room log cabin or the sumptuous retreat of land-owning executives.  Not always, but in many instances Mainers will use ‘camp’ for a building others would call a cottage.  ‘Going to camp’ does not mean tenting out in Maine, but moving to the cottage on the lake or in the  woods for the season, or for a vacation.”

‘Going camp’ to me means dressing tacky, so Maineiacs should be careful not to drop the “to” in ‘Going to camp’ when talking to out-of-staters.

I didn’t include all the other meanings of camp in my treatment because I wanted all my readers to finish reading it in a day.

Bekki just dropped of this note:

“That’s too funny! I just took the Advanced Yankee VS Dixie test and it said that I am 1% Dixie. I grew up in Richmind, Virginia, the capital of the South. Still, with a father from Conetticut and a mother from a different country completely, I guess it’s not that unusual.“

Well, Bekki, first let a North Carolinian correct your geography: Richmond is the capital of Virginia. Any city claiming the title of “Capital of the South” would have to be located a bit deeper in the South.

More to your point, our Rebel-Yankee and Advanced Rebel-Yankee Tests can only reflect how you speak, not where you live. In fact, as the years roll by, its accuracy may be fading.

My sisters in North Carolina just equipped themselves with Skype and we are talking with each other more frequently. The remarkable thing is that my sisters’ southern accent is still quite remarkable but their grandchildren–all of them–speak with no identifiable accent, which is to say, just like TV personalities.

If you are young, you may be in that first generation of Southerners who have lost their regional identity as expressed by regional dialects. Television and radio, combined with the growing migration from North to South, is eroding the most noticeable cultural difference between the two regions. I fear that in another 20 years, the Rebel-Yankee Tests may be irrelevant.

This morning my wife and breakfasted at a local Pennsylvania Dutch (= Deutsch “German”) restaurant where two new and very young waitresses served us. My wife ordered two poached eggs. A few moments later the manager came out and asked if she really wanted two poached steaks. Apparently, poached steaks were not ordered very often at Ards Farm Market & Restaurant.

Well, my wife didn’t order two poached steaks either, but it is easy to understand how someone raised among the German-Americans in our area would have made the mistake. My wife asked for two [potsht egz]; that is the way she pronounced it.  At the end of German words, however, voiced consonants like [g] and [z] are pronounced without voicing (vibrating the vocal cords), so [g] becomes [k] and [z] becomes [s]. Our cook heard the waitress order two [potsht eks] = “poached steaks’. Now that is exactly how someone with a “Dutch” accent would pronounce poached eggs but not how someone without an accent would hear it.

Final unvoicing, changing a voiced to an unvoiced consonant at the end of a word, is common. The incident reminded me of my first breakfast in Serbia decades ago. My wife and I had never breakfasted in Serbia before, so we were not sure what to expect. However, we were in the big city, Beograd, and in Beograd they are prepared for the foreign tourist. For that reason the most prominent menu entry was “hemeneks”. My wife wondered what in the world that was. I explained to her that this would be the way she would hear ”ham and eggs” pronounced for the coming year.

Here is one from the weird and wonderful world of the world’s worst spellers. It was sent to me by Martha Hulshof.

“How about this one, huxion, found in an old 1956 cookbook from Downeast Yarmouth, Maine? My mother-in-law is from Holland and her mother used to cook like this, but she’s not sure what the word means. I looked on line and, remarkably enough, found refrence to the VERY SAME recipie but that author did not know the meaning of the word either! I wonder could you ascertain its origin and meaning.”

I can’t prove this but I am so sure this is what happened. The stew is made from a hock (hough in Scotland, pronounced [hox]). The hock is that part of an animal’s hind leg just below the knee, thus located near the shin, so some people have used the word hockshin for a long time. It is still alive in parts of Northern England and Scotland, I believe; we have written documentation from as late as 1886. In some areas it has been reduced to ‘huxon’, only a letter away from huxion.

Now, what if we spelled hockshin by the Latin rules of spelling? Hoxion would certainly be a candidate and from hoxion to huxion is but a tiny skid. These types of spelling errors are common for words that are mostly heard and seldom seen in writing.

Further evidence is provided by preserved written examples of hox and huxen in the sense of “hamstring”. The examples are old and these words are clearly archaic but may well have been involved in the shift of CKS to X and the shift from O to U.

Bottom line, the spelling of the word hockshin has rambled all over the place in the past three centuries. That the spelling huxion was one of those places, doesn’t surprise me at all.