Truly, truly awful

[Orion Montoya]

I heard your wife's pronunciation once, in the mid-late nineties, on a
high-school girl from Phoenix.  I assumed it was a mis-parsing of the
words in the compound, like the couple people I've met who pronounce
"albeit" with two syllables to rhyme with German "arbeit" (i.e.
/Al'baIt/).

But the idea that godawful might be euphemistically "mispronounced" is
interesting; reminds me of the OED citation from Farquhar that says,
of "zounds": "Zoons is only us'd by the disbanded Officers and
Bullies: but Zauns is the Beaux pronuncation [sic]" -- that the
invocation of god's wounds is less coarse if they can't really make
out that you're saying "wounds".

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 09:30:52 -0500, David Bowie <db.list at pmpkn.net> wrote:
> Jeanne, my wife, was reading this column out loud to our daughters, and she
> read the word "godawful" as [g@'da.fl] (where @ is a schwa); i asked her to
> reread the sentence, and she did so with the same pronunciation. This
> contrasts with my pronunciation, which is ['ga.dO.fl] (where O is open-o).
>
> The cot-caught thing aside, has anyone else here ever run across Jeanne's
> pronunciation (or never heard mine, FTM) of this word?