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.
I guess now that you're retired, you're allowed to say that students are really "stooges". :-) That's a new one for me.
ReplyDeleteI've always loved the word hoosegow, and I was so jazzed when I found out it really did mean jail.
The haphazard/half-assed thing makes perfect sense. So does bug-eyed.
Enlightening as usual, Mr. Monger!
Greetings Anne, & thanks for coming by. I'm glad to have been of some value entertainment-wise.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of stories I hear about families that use endearingly mispronounced words because the youngest sibling had such a cute way of speaking. Or children mishearing words like, undertoad instead of undertow in The World According to Garp. I wonder just how many words make it into our vernacular that way. You always give me something to think about. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteHey Christine,
ReplyDeleteI'm a big fan of "undertoad" too.
Thanks for coming by.
This was a particularly fun post, Charlie. I, too, especially like the "hoosegow," "half-assed," and "bug-eyed" derivations. My sister and I always called each other "stooge." I wish she were alive so I could share the probably origin with her.
ReplyDeleteAnother word used in Spain for court is the Catalan word "jutjat," which English speakers have a heck of a time pronouncing. I wonder what we could make of it.
Some fun words used by our family derived from wee ones' mispronunciations are "hoppadoctor" for helicopter, "instink" for instinct, "kaykoo," for thank you, and "dub-ee-dubs" for bugs.