bath vs. bathe

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Friday, August 23, 2002 6:39 am -0700 James Smith
<jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

> My mother-in-law, born and raised in Utah, uses "bath"
> for "bathe" - she's the only person I've ever heard do
>  this, and she does not like to be "corrected".

That's because she's not wrong:  (I think I've told this story here before.
Apologies to those who hear it a 2nd time.)

A 75-year-old Englishman in one of my classes corrected me vehemently when
I pronounced the sentence "Mother bathed the baby" as if they verb were
'bathe' rather than 'bath'.  He insisted that you 'bathe' in the sea, but
you 'bath' in a tub, and he made out to be telling me (the American) how to
pronounce the language 'correctly'.  He turned to his 21-year-old
classmates for support, and most looked at him like he was crazy--they say
'bathe'.

A few months later, my 70-something aunt (originally from western NY, but a
50-year resident of Indiana) was over for a visit, and she told a story in
which my grandmother 'bathed the baby'--pronounced like 'bath'.

So, this suggested to me that the difference might be not so much
regional/dialectal as it generational.

However, dictionaries do treat this as a dialectal US/UK difference.  AHD4
has no verb entry for 'bath'.  MW9 treats it as "British".
NODE (UK) gives have-a-bath senses (note: Brits have a bath/shower/walk,
rather than _taking_ one) of both 'bath' and 'bathe', and treats the 'bathe
in the sea' sense as 'chiefly British'.

Lynne

Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA Applied Linguistics

School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9QH
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