Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"

Neal Whitman nwhitman at AMERITECH.NET
Tue Feb 10 05:02:23 UTC 2009


I haven't read the full article, but there's probably more on this topic in
David Bowie's spring 2008 American Speech article on the 'cord/card merger'
in Utah. (Or for the more scatologically minded, the 'fort/fart' merger.)

Neal

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wilson Gray" <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 11:38 PM
Subject: Re: Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"


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> header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> And the ones who visit the Saint Louis Zoo in "Farest Pork." My
> high-school Latin teacher, who was from Omaha, used to claim that that
> was the way that we talked. Ridiculous! We said "Farest *Park*."
>
> I've noticed that there are speakers who, to my ear, strangely don't
> distinguish between "war" and "wore."  OTOH, I don't distinguish
> between "Worf" and "wharf."
>
> -Wilson
> â?"â?"â?"
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
> -Mark Twain
>
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 1:38 AM, Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at wmich.edu>
> wrote:
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>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
>> Subject:      Re: Eggcorn? "warn" > "worn"
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I'd imagine the warn/worn distinction, for those who have it, would
>> be parallel to things like horse/hoarse--going back to an old /Or/:/
>> o:r/ distinction.  The possibility of a distinction shown in OED is a
>> relic of that--in really old fashioned British Received
>> Pronunciation, you would get /wO:n/ vs. /wO at n/, but most people born
>> after Winston Churchill wouldn't have that.  I'd suspect it survives
>> nicely in the American South--or at least many parts of it.  Wouldn't
>> a pronunciation of warn with /A/ be possible in St. Louis, and a few
>> other Midland areas, incl. the ones where people are "barn in the born"?
>>
>> Paul Johnston
>> On Feb 9, 2009, at 12:46 AM, Randy Alexander wrote:
>>
>>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
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>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
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