The geek voice?

Arne Adolfsen recently reported on Facebook that he’d been hearing the hit television show The Big Bang Theory. (Yes, hearing, not listening to, and certainly not watching. The show goes on in a room next to the one he’s in. He avoids it, because he hates the very obtrusive laugh track, an antipathy I sympathize with.) He’s formed the opinion that all of the male characters are gay, because of the way they talk [because of the phonetics of their talk. which is all he has to go on -- see comments]. (Possibly relevant fact: Arne is gay.) Yet they’re all presented as straight — and awkwardly pursuing women — and the actors playing them all seem to be straight in real life [which is to say: there's an apparent disjunction between orientation as perceived from phonetics and orientation as presented in the story -- again, see comments]. Where does Arne’s impression come from?

Go pho it

Saturday night I had dinner at the fusion Vietnamese restaurant Three Seasons in Palo Alto, sitting at the bar for a while with the owner, John Le Hung. He was having the wonderful pho that he added to the menu a while back (the Vietnamese soup that is classically slices of beef and rice noodles in a rich beef broth, with bean sprouts, basil leaves, lime juice, sriracha sauce, and hoisin sauce added at the last minute) and lapsed for a moment into puns on pho, which triggered a cascade of mental punning in me. Turns out that puns on pho abound, extravagantly.

Low vowels

More from the “Metropolitan Diary” in yesterday’s NYT, a letter from Kevin J. Farrelly with a puzzle in the production and perception of vowels:

Aah

Today’s Rhymes With Orange:

The easy way to read “Aah’m not a failure” is as having the monophthongization of [aj] in I to [a], a phonetic feature widespread in the dialects of the American South. But there’s another possibility.

One of the concomitants of (certain instances of) Auxiliary Reduction in American English (and perhaps other varieties) is a laxing of a final tense vowel in the word hosting the reduced auxiliary. The phenomenon is quite specific, affecting only certain pronoun hosts, and then only when they are the complete subjects of the auxiliary (the facts are reasonably well-known, and several proposals have been made to describe them). The combination of the pronoun I and the reduced variant ‘m of the auxiliary am (as in I’m going now) is one case in point: though most speakers believe that they pronounce the combination as [ajm], in fact the pronunciation [am] prevails for many (including me, though I am not a speaker of a Southern American variety), except when the subject I is accented for emphasis or contrast. If you hear that pronunciation, you’d be likely to represent it orthographically as AAH’M, as in the cartoon.

 

Fun with cot/caught

Passed on by Jeff Shaumeyer on Facebook, about the story “RCMP say vicious beating of gay man at St. Leon’s Hot Springs a hate crime” in the Arrow Lake News (BC):

It’s a vicious hate-crime and the RCMP should get their man, although it may take a bit longer if they keep looking for “….a Caucasian male standing at about 6 feet tall (180 cm), around 44-years-old with a stalky, muscular build.” ‘Stalky’? Like celery?

What we have here is an instance of the a-ɔ merger (the merger in cot-caught and many other pairs), in favor of ɔ, so that stocky is pronounced like stalky. And then the journalist spelled by ear. Possibly the journalist thought that stockiness had something to do with height, as in stalks, which would make the misspelling an eggcorn.

And indeed among the cot/caught mergers in the Eggcorn Database is stock >> stalk (entry here), but chiefly in stalk-still for stock-still.

The pig’s daughter

Another cartoon for the weekend, this one another Zippy in which Bill Griffith draws on references to 20th-century poetry (on other occasions, art), especially with a pop slant:

Even without the “Beatnik Poetry Day” caption, I would have recognized this as beatnik poetry. But echt-beatnik or Griffith-style faux-beatnik? Some of it sounded familiar enough to be the genuine article, and by now I’ve come to expect Griffith’s pop-culture references to be mostly right on target and not inventions.

I leave it to someone else to work out all the references, homing in instead on the one that clanged loudest in my memory, marrying the pig’s daughter.

The patio footnote

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky reported a few days ago that she had found an odd footnote in L. Frank Baum’s The Magic of Oz (1919), p. 73. The text goes:

The Sorceress smiled and answered:

“Come into my patio* and I will show you.”

So they entered a place that was surrounded by the wings of the great castle but had no roof …

This is in effect a definition of patio, giving the OED’s (draft revision of June 2009) older sense, ‘In a Spanish or Mexican house, a roofless inner courtyard open to the sky’, attested from 1764 (but obviously not always restricted to Spanish or Mexican houses); the external version (‘A paved roofless area adjoining and belonging to a house’) is attested from 1931 (from P.G. Wodehouse!) on.

So far so good. The footnote gives a pronunciation:

* Pronounced pa′-shi-o.

That’s the odd part: the assibilated middle syllable [ʃi], instead of [ti]. A variety of pronunciations have been reported for patio, but I haven’t seen this one before.

In any case, you can view the original by going to page 73 here.