Archive: Arts & Entertainment

SMART TALK SMART TALK

by Dr. Dot Pilcrow


POURED OVER: Here at the Center for English as a First Language, we're very interested in errors caused by poor listening, poor pronunciation, or regional dialect. Notice that word poor, for instance. The double O is pronounced like the double O in hoot. Its homonym, pour, sounds exactly the same. That's why it's a homonym.

However, we've found well meaning people say both words as if they were pore, as in "pore me a glass of milk" or "give to the pore."

Hence this week's subject. The same well meaning citizens hear that the lawyers pored over a document and think it's the same word they mispronounce when they put milk into a glass. No, it's not pour, it's pore, which, unlike poor and pour, rhymes with door.

This confusion has bedeviled us for centuries, and we can blame the English. The people, that is. To some Brits, Iago was a More, not a Moor. Some pronounced the name Moore as if it were spelled More, and before spelling became more or less as settled as it is, the name was often written both ways in the document those lawyers were poring over.

Regional accents actually changed people's names. At Ellis Island, an English immigrant named White might pronounce it Hoyt. Thus it was written down, and thus it became the family name.

You can find similar connections by poring over the records.

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