[Ads-l] =?UTF-8?Q?=C2=A0_=C2=A0_=C2=A0_?="potato" vs. "potahto"?

[Jonathan Lighter]

I've said for many years that I've never heard anybody say "potahto"
in a sentence.

It now turns out I was mistaken, or, in current lingo, "lying."

The classic pop song, "Yes, We Have No Bananas!" (1923), by Frank
Silver and Irving Cohn, contains the once familiar lines,

"We have an old-fashioned tomahto,
A  Long Island potahto,
But Yes! We have no bananas!...."

Wikipedia quotes Silver: "About a year ago my little orchestra was
playing at a Long Island hotel. To and from the hotel I would stop at
a fruit stand owned by a Greek, who began every sentence with 'Yes'.
The jingle of his idiom haunted me and my friend Cohn. Finally I wrote
this verse and Cohn fitted it with a tune."

So "Yes! We Have No Bananas!" may have set the "potahto" idea afloat.
It may be that the Greek grocer actually uttered the pronunciation
(since a "fruit stand" might well have sold vegetables also).  But
that is idle speculation.

What little evidence we have indicates that Frank Silver lies behind
the absurd pronunciation "potahto."


JL

On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 5:59 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I used to say "tomahto" till I was ridiculed out of it, but I've never heard anyone say "potahto."  Some fifty years ago I asked my grandparents why they didn't say it (to be consistent with "tomahto"), and their response was something like, "because no one says 'potahto.' "
>
> So evidently they'd never been aware of it outside of the song either, as far back as the 1890's.
>
> JL
>
> "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
> Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:_=A0_=A0_=A0_"potato"_vs._"potahto"=3F?=
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On May 19, 2006, at 10:24 AM, RonButters wrote:
>
> > In a message dated 5/19/06 1:12:06 PM, s-mufwene at UCHICAGO.EDU writes:
> >
> >
> >> The following sentence occurs in an article published today in the
> >> Chicago Tribune about the US Senate's vote to declare English the
> >> "national language":
> >>
> >> "We think it's basically the same thing. It's a `You say potato, I
> >> say
> >> potahto' kind of thing," said Tim Schultz, director of government
> >> relations of U.S. English Inc.
> >>
> >> I have always heard the variation about "tomato." Is there really a
> >> [p@'ta:to] pronunciation of "potato" too?
> >>
> >> Sali.
> >>
> >
> > You say tomato, and I say tomahto,
> > You say potato, and I say potahto--
> > Tomato, tomahto; potato, potahto--
> > Let's call the whole thing off.
> >
> > Song (Cole Porter?)
>
> yes, Cole Porter.
>
> but the "potato" part of the song was in there just to get a rhyme.
> is there any evidence of pronunciations of "potato" with [a] rather
> than [e] *before* "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off"?
>
> in fact, is there any evidence that some people now use the [a]
> pronunciation, except in an allusion to the song?
>
> for what it's worth, the OED doesn't list it.
>
> arnold
>
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