"bone marror"
Laurence Horn
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sat Jul 18 02:08:36 UTC 2009
At 8:25 PM -0400 7/17/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>This is only my opinion, based only on my personal experience, but I
>think that the modulo is unnecessary. R-less folk don't say marrow
>borrow Storrow tomorow Morrow or any other words of this type with
>final [ou], even up here in the Boston area, where "Harvard" sounds
>less like "Hah vud" and more like "Have id," among the hoi polloi.
>Down home and in Los Angeles, I once knew two different guys named
>"Carlos." Their name was pronounced "Kah liss [kal at s / kalIs]. (Once,
>a local asked why I called Collis "Carlos.") Words in -ow are
>pronounced with [-@] and every non-rhotic speaker "knows" that [@] is
>replaced by [(V)r] in proper English.
>
>-Wilson
Makes sense to me. I was certainly figuring "marror" was intended to
represent ['maer@], homophonous with Mara (e.g. the family name of
the owner of the "New York Football Giants", as some of us old-timers
still calls the team).
LH
>
>On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>> Sender: ? ? ? American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: ? ? ? Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>> Subject: ? ? ? "bone marror"
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Not exactly an eggcorn, but more than a typo. ? I came across a
>> reference to "bone marror" in a posting on my cancer support list,
>> and noting that "r" and "w" keys are relatively close but not
>> adjacent on the keyboard wondered if it could be a reanalysis. ? Sure
>> enough, there are over 680 raw g-hits for "bone marror", as in "bone
>> marror transplant", "bone marror donor" (progressive assimilation
>> involved here?) and even, with liaison, "bone marror and onion soup".
>> I suspect most of these are from non-rhotic speakers, where "marror"
>> and "marrow" would be almost homophones (modulo the pronunciation of
>> the last vowel, but cf. our earlier threads on "high yeller",
>> "feller", and such).
>>
>> Without the bone, many of the hits for "marror" involve a geminate
>> version of what's usually rendered as "maror", the bitter herb on the
>> seder plate at Passover. ? There's often a bone on the same plate, but
>> I doubt anyone associates that shank bone with a "marror bone", for
>> which there are in any case virtually no hits.
>>
>> LH
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
>--
>-Wilson
>---
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-----
>-Mark Twain
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
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