hawk/hock

[Baker, John]

        I guess I'm Gordon's exact opposite.  Hawk=sell is familiar to me, "hock" in no way strikes me as rare, it never occurred to me that "hawk" and "hock" could be homophones, but my initial moral superiority is utterly lost if I try to distinguish "pen" and "pin."  In fact, I'm in pretty bad shape with the whole concept of basing morality on vowel distinguishing, other than hawk/hock.

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: Gordon, Matthew J. [mailto:GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2002 2:18 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: hawk/hock


I can confirm Dennis' prediction. I am a degenerate conflater of low back vowels (though my soul may be salvaged by my maintenance of the pen/pin distinction). I don't think I've ever seen 'hawk' in the meaning of  "sell" written. If I had heard someone using it, I would have guessed the intended form was 'hock'.
Both of these words are pretty rare (not the bird sense, of course) and the semantic similarity is pretty strong.