meranghy

[Victor Steinbok]

I know next to nothing about accents--I can probably tell apart some of
the locals along upper Atlantic Coast, but, beyond that, I'm lost--I
would probably confuse accents from Texas, Tennessee and Maryland. [Save
the jokes about what it is that I *do* know for later...] But I can tell
an annoying accent when I hear one--because it is, well, annoying. The
most annoying accent in a cooking show belongs to Ingrid Hoffmann, who
has dual TV shows on the Cooking Channel and on Galavision (essentially
the same show in different languages). I am not sure where the annoying
part comes from--she grew up in Cali and lives in Miami, so maybe she
picked it up from the Miami snowbirds. But when she drops Spanish words
(e.g., "jalapeno") in her English-language show, she sounds like Jimmy
Smits in his infamous SNL episode--it sounds exaggerated even though I
am sure it's impeccable Spanish (for some dialect).

But this is not the part that got me today--instead, it was her
pronunciation of "meringue". What I heard was "mehRANghy", with a
classic [Midwestern?] open [æ] and a very distinct [ı] at the end [not a
schwa, which did appear in the first syllable]. I've heard some odd
pronunciations of that word, but this one was a head-scratcher [for me],
particularly from a long-time TV personality and restaurateur.

VS-)

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org