Mispronunciations
Sometimes
our words come from mispronunciations.
An apprentice or lackey
for a more talented individual can be referred to as a student, at one time
pejoratively mispronounced stugent. Though it’s not nailed
down, some linguists assert that in 1913
this purposeful mispronunciation spawned the word stooge.
The
Spanish word juzgar means to judge. The
court or tribunal where a judge might be employed is a juzgao. Some time around
1911 we Americans mispronounced juzgao & misunderstood its
meaning, and voila, hoosegow was born,
In
Turkish, the letter g can represent a sound somewhat close to an English w.
The Turkish word yog, meaning to condense,
is the root of the Turkish word yogurt (pronounced in Turkish yowurt).
The spelling led to the English mispronunciation of yogurt, which entered the
language in the 1620s.
The
word for golden in Middle Dutch was gulden.
In the late 1400s, English speakers mispronounced gulden, morphing it into guilder.
The
word bulge,
meaning a rounded projection or
protuberance, appears to have been dialectically mispronounced about 1872
as bug,
giving us the term bug-eyed. So even though some insects may be bug-eyed,
the bug
in bug-eyed
doesn’t mean bug.
The
word haphazard,
meaning unplanned, random or ineffectual,
appears to be the source of the crass & initially purposefully
mispronounced word half-assed, which came to English in 1913.