Herb et al.,

 

I’m just chiming in with three short, unrelated notes. Apologies for the rather Andy Rooney-esque organization:

 

As perhaps another example of analogy at work, my pronunciation (and I’m almost positive it’s that of my family, and people where I grew up) of “grocer” is roughly ‘grosher’ (haven’t figured out IPA in email yet). A ‘groser’ sounds like s/he would be someone who grosses other people out.

 

When we discuss whether a particular dialect distinguishes vowels, in, for example, the cot/caught pair, it’s important also to keep in mind that two dialects that distinguish those words may distinguish them differently. I grew up pronouncing those two differently, the first one being “kaht” and the second being “kawt.’ This caused me no end of trouble when I took my first phonology course, the textbook for which also exemplified one vowel distinction with “pen vs. pin” (to a Southerner, those sound exactly the same). I thought at first that my dialect simply did not have the tense lower back rounded vowel that some dialects have in “caught,” until I noticed that I did indeed have it – in “boil” (and not as part of a diphthong). My phonology textbook, like all the textbooks I had had before, assumed that the reader was either from the North or from the Midwest, and presented examples accordingly.

 

Finally, three medical mondegreens. These are from a colleague whose boyfriend, a doctor, collected them in the Houston Medical Center, although my aunt (who worked in a pharmacy) heard the first one as well:

 

            precious pills                 =          blood pressure pills.

 

            Texas cyclone               =          tetracycline                  

 

            spiral mini-Jesus            =          spinal meningitis

 

That last one is simply a wonder. What processes (other than simply phonetic similarity) could have led to its creation, and what it says about the speaker’s religious worldview, I can’t begin to fathom.

 

Bill Spruiell

Dept. of English

Central Michigan University