"bone marror"

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:25 PM -0400 7/17/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>This is only my opinion, based only on my personal experience, but I
>think that the modulo is unnecessary. R-less folk don't say marrow
>borrow  Storrow  tomorow  Morrow or any other words of this type with
>final [ou], even up here in the Boston area, where "Harvard" sounds
>less like "Hah vud" and more like "Have id," among the hoi polloi.
>Down home and in Los Angeles, I once knew two different guys named
>"Carlos." Their name was pronounced "Kah liss [kal at s / kalIs]. (Once,
>a local asked why I called Collis "Carlos.") Words in -ow are
>pronounced with [-@] and every non-rhotic speaker "knows" that [@] is
>replaced by [(V)r] in proper English.
>
>-Wilson

Makes sense to me. I was certainly figuring "marror" was intended to
represent ['maer@], homophonous with Mara (e.g. the family name of
the owner of the "New York Football Giants", as some of us old-timers
still calls the team).

LH

>
>On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>  Sender: ?  ?  ?  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster: ?  ?  ?  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>  Subject: ?  ?  ? "bone marror"
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  Not exactly an eggcorn, but more than a typo. ? I came across a
>>  reference to "bone marror" in a posting on my cancer support list,
>>  and noting that "r" and "w" keys are relatively close but not
>>  adjacent on the keyboard wondered if it could be a reanalysis. ? Sure
>>  enough, there are over 680 raw g-hits for "bone marror", as in "bone
>>  marror transplant", "bone marror donor" (progressive assimilation
>>  involved here?) and even, with liaison, "bone marror and onion soup".
>>  I suspect most of these are from non-rhotic speakers, where "marror"
>>  and "marrow" would be almost homophones (modulo the pronunciation of
>>  the last vowel, but cf. our earlier threads on "high yeller",
>>  "feller", and such).
>>
>>  Without the bone, many of the hits for "marror" involve a geminate
>>  version of what's usually rendered as "maror", the bitter herb on the
>>  seder plate at Passover. ? There's often a bone on the same plate, but
>>  I doubt anyone associates that shank bone with a "marror bone", for
>>  which there are in any case virtually no hits.
>>
>>  LH
>>
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>
>
>
>--
>-Wilson
>---
>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
>
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>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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