hawk/hock

[Baker, John]

        It seems to me that you're making something of a leap here.  The shop owner used "hawk" in his shop name, he said in his brief conversation with me, because it means to sell.  As such, it was used correctly and with the correct spelling.  (Traditionally, "hawk" means to sell as an itinerant peddler, but I think that the term as used in the U.S. simply means to sell aggressively, not necessarily as an itinerant or in the street.)  You are suggesting that the shop owner was under a double confusion:  First, he thought that the term "hock," also rare locally, means to sell rather than to pawn, and second, he thought that the word is spelled h-a-w-k.  Instead of assuming that the owner used the wrong word and happened to misspell it in a way that coincidentally made his usage correct, isn't it simpler to assume that he was using the right word in the right way?

-----Original Message-----
From: Herbert Stahlke [mailto:hstahlke at WORLDNET.ATT.NET]
Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 9:51 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: hawk/hock


I lean towards my original assumption, when I pointed this new Muncie store
out to Mai and to one of my undergrad Language and Society classes.  "Hawk",
in the sense of "sell in the street or door to door" isn't a very common
verb in this area.  Many of my Central Indiana students didn't know that
meaning.  They knew of the bird and the act of clearing one's throat
noisily, but not this form of commerce.  Knowing the owners and employees of
this shop, I tend to doubt that they know it either.  The place is something
of a used equipment store.  The owners do, as you thought, pronounce "hawk"
and "hock" the same, though, as one would expect of natives of a low back
vowel merger region.  My guess is that the word "hock", which is also not
particularly common around here--many of my students didn't know that one
either--was confused with its homophone "hawk" and used loosely to mean
"sell".

Herb Stahlke