"Bath-ing"

[Damien Hall]

Chris' BrE friend's intuitions (below) are mine, too, with some minor wrinkles.
It's not in my idiolect ever to say "I'm bathing" (AY) intransitively, even
playfully - it would have to be "I'm having a bath".  Similarly, if I ever used
the verb transitively, as in "I'm bathing the baby", it would be pronounced
[baTIN];  but I think I would be more likely to use the paraphrase "I'm giving
the baby a bath".

I'm from the South-East too - London - though my family is from the North-East.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania


On Mon, 9 Jan 2006 22:11:03 -0500, Wilson Gray typed:

> Is this true?
>
> A friend of mine from Ipswich, England, once told me that, in the
> Mother Country,  "bathing" [beiDIN] no longer refers to taking a
> bath. Rather, it refers to spending time at the beach. If you want
> - or, rather, if one wishes - to refer to taking a literal bath,
> the verb to use is "bahthing" [baTIN].

I only had one BrE speaker available right now (it _is_ a bit late
over there), so for what it's worth... He's from the South-East
somewhere, btw. His report:

- bathing, pronounced [bEiDIN] is an "archaism" for "swimming" and
mostly survives in "sun-bathing"
- bathing, pronounced [baTIN] is how he'd pronounce the transitive
verb, as in "bathing a baby"; this "sounds wrong" intransitively (in
the sense "taking a bath"), but he might use it "playfully"

He added: "If I were feeling Edwardian, I might say 'when I was
bathing this morning' (AY) in the same kind of way I would say
'during my ablutions'; or if I needed it for an acronym or
a rhyme or something."