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.
