foot/hoof-and-mouth

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 09:21 AM 2/28/2001 -0500, bergdahl at ohio.edu wrote:
>This morning on CNBC one of the Jersey City hosts commented on the
>Frankfort reporter's use of "foot-and-mouth disease" in place of the
>more American English "hoof-and-mouth disease."  Then an hour later I
>heard a local radio announcer use "foot" as well; the local announcer
>was a student worker at our NPR station.  Are both forms used in the
>US?  I've up to now only heard "hoof-and-mouth disease."
>

Isn't it likely that American urbanites with little farming experience would
simply see "foot and mouth" in UK news stories, which is where those stories
are emanating from right now, and naturally assume that the writers of the
news stories were using the appropriate name? Personal usage note: I've
always assumed the two words were synonyms and hadn't realized until just
now that there might be a UK/US terminological split. The disease appears as
"foot and mouth" in Joyce's _Ulysses_ (1922) and the large secondary
literature on Joyce, a good deal of it written and published in North
America, employs both "foot and mouth" and "hoof and mouth," the latter
obviously not in quoting from _Ulysses_ itself.


Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu