I was considering the word mall, thinking vaguely that it had something to do with Pall Mall, and when I investigated I found such an interesting mess I thought I’d share it. The OED’s entry (revised 2000) starts with “Senses deriving from the place where pall-mall was played” (c1660 “The Mall [at Tours], which is without comparison the noblest..in Europ… Here we play’d a party or two,” J. Evelyn, Diary anno 1644 vol. II. 145); these lead to “A fashionable assembly in the open air; a sheltered walk serving as a promenade; in some towns adopted as a proper name” (1710 “The intrigues of the mall and the playhouse,” S. Palmer, Moral Essays Prov. 203), and this to the modern sense:
I.2.c. Chiefly North American, Australian, and New Zealand. A shopping precinct or street closed to vehicles; a large (usually covered) shopping centre; = shopping mall n.
1959 Kalamazoo’s permanent downtown mall..is an expression of the great need to do something to pull the central business districts of our nation out of the low estate in which they have fallen.
Chain Store Age October e31963 The central paved avenue, or ‘mall’ [in a shopping centre], wider than any street, with booths in the middle.
Observer 15 September 23/6
[…]1980 I’ll paint myself bright green all over and walk down the Mall in the nuddy!
E. Metcalfe, Garden Party 43
[…]
The etymology was surprising:
Probably a specific application of maul n.¹ [‘a hammer’] (compare form mall at that entry, and form maul in quot. 1706 for the Mall n. at sense I.2a), after 17th-cent. senses of French mail (see mail n.⁵ [‘the game of pall-mall; a place where the game was played’]). Compare also pall-mall n.
OK, let’s compare pall-mall:
1. A game in which players use a mallet to drive a boxwood ball through an iron ring suspended at the end of a long alley in as few strokes as possible, or within a given number of strokes. Now historical.
The game was popular in Italy, France, and Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in England in the 17th cent.a1566 At Chasteubriant the French King shewed my Lord Marquess great plesure and disport, sometime in plaing at tenice,..sometime at the palla malla.
T. Hoby, Travels (1902) 72
[…]2. † A mallet for striking a ball; spec. a mallet used in the game of pall-mall. Obsolete.
[…]3.a. Usually in form Pall Mall. The name of a street in central London (running between St James’s Street and Haymarket) which developed from an alley in which the game of pall-mall was played. Also metonymically (now historical): the War Office situated in Pall Mall.
The street is known for the large number of private clubs located there.[1650 Pell Mell Close… Elm trees standing in Pall Mall Walk, in a very decent and regular manner on both sides the walk, being in number 140.
Return Commissioners of Crown Lands in Archæological Journal (1854) vol. 11 256]1656–7 Down the Haymarket and in the Pall Mall.
in P. Cunningham, Handbook London (new edition) 372/2
[…]1900 Should the tape-bound authorities in Pall Mall blankly refuse to equip..the 320 extra men.
Westminster Gazette 5 July 5/22003 He was looking forward to a good lunch at his club, the Oxford & Cambridge in Pall Mall.
Evening Standard (Nexis) 27 February 36
The etymology:
< Middle French, French †pallemaille, †paillemaille, †palmail, †palmaille, †palemail, †palemaille (1552 in Rabelais as pillemaille) < Italian pallamaglio (1545; end of the 15th cent. as palla a maglio) < palla ball (a1292; < an unattested Langobardic cognate of Old High German ballā ball n.¹) + maglio mallet (a1320; < classical Latin malleus hammer: see malleus n.). Compare mall n.¹
Notes
In β forms apparently influenced by pell-mell adv., adj., & n. (compare forms at that entry).
New English Dictionary (OED first edition) (1904) gives the pronunciation as (pelˌmel) /pɛlˈmɛl/ .
And pell-mell started out as the military “without keeping ranks; hand to hand, man to man; in a mêlée” and wound up as the more general “In a confused medley or throng; with disorderly mingling; together without any order”:
< Middle French pelle-melle, pesle mesle, pelle et melle, etc., French pêle-mêle (12th cent. in Old French as adverb as mele pesle, pel et melle, 13th cent. as melle pelle, pelle et mesle, pesle mesle, pelle melle; 1596 as noun), ultimately < mesler, meller to mix (see meddle v.), probably originally as a variant (with dissimilation) of the reduplicated form mesle-mesle (13th cent.), although it has also been suggested that the first element might show Old French pesle bolt (< classical Latin pessulus: see pessulus n.). Compare mel-pell adv., and earlier pelly melly adv.
Like I said, a mess (I haven’t even dealt with the pronunciation, which can be /mal/ or /mɔːl/ without much geographical clarity); I especially like the form pelly melly and the quote “I’ll paint myself bright green all over and walk down the Mall in the nuddy!”
A possibly unhelpful disambiguation suggestion is attributed to Vonnegut: “The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells.”
There was from 1965 to 1978 (if the internet’s specification is accurate) a notable music venue in Boston called Paul’s Mall. In addition to various jazzmen and bluesmen, it hosted the American debut of Bob Marley and important early performances by performers as varied as B. Springsteen and B. Manilow. I became aware of it circa ’79 when reading the liner notes of Aerosmith’s _Live! Bootleg_ double album, which had some early-and-interesting ’73 recordings made there mixed in with the ’77-’78 recordings that made up the rest of the album, by which more recent time the band had graduated to playing in hockey arenas that held maybe 50x the capacity of P’sM. One source says the club was co-owned by one guy named Fred and another named Tony, so the name was purely for the wordplay. (Which works better for those with the cot-caught merger but is probably close enough for jazz for those without it.)
Barry Springsteen and Bruce Manilow!
Together again for the first time!
I seem to recall “Pall Mall can’t spall” in one of those 1970s graffiti anthologies. Google finds a few hits for the quip but it hardly proves any currency for the pronunciation
Wikipedia asserts (and presumably one could find audio evidence with digging) that back in the era when you could still advertise cigarettes on U.S. television and radio (which ended at the beginning of 1971) the ads for the Pall Mall brand used the “pell mell” pronunciation but after those were banned from the airwaves popular usage shifted to the spelling pronunciation, a process largely completed before my own cigarette-smoking days in the 1980’s.
Okay, here’s a link to a 1963 tv ad with the “ell” pronunciation manifested in a catchy jingle. … And They’re Mild.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brWMDAXQIoM
JWB-
“ Which works better for those with the cot-caught merger but is probably close enough for jazz for those without it.”
I don’t have the cot-caught merger, but that rhyme works for me, since I have /ɔ/ in both ‘Paul’ and ‘mall’. Would you (or others) say /pɔlz mal/ or something? Or /pɔlz mæl/ ?
@Matt A: Paul’s Maul would rhyme for me and apparently some w/o merger have maul and mall as homophones but I don’t seem to. So I’d have /pɔlz mal/. At least if enunciating slowly and carefully and perhaps self-consciously. I can’t swear things don’t vary in other circumstances, and it’s certainly possible that the admitted near-rhyme itself promotes a realization of the two vowels that’s closer than you would get in either word if pronounce on a freestanding basis in a different context.
ETA: perhaps relevantly, Paulie and Molly don’t perfectly rhyme for me, which is perhaps another way of saying Paulie is not homophonous with Polly.
Molly & Polly are supposed to have LOT, though the following /l/ introduces complications in some accents (holy and holey have different first vowels in some… though that’s a split of GOAT).
I have LOT for Polly & Molly but THOUGHT/CLOTH for Paul & Mall. So Paulie is also not homophonous with Polly for me, even though Paul & Mall rhyme. Mergers/splits are weird
Paul, Paulie, maul, Mall, all – all THOUGHT.
Good call.
important early performances
And Weather Report and Willie Bobo and Mongo Santamaria.
And important late performances: Rahsaan played at the Jazz Workshop after his stroke in 76. (At least I think it was there.)
pesle mesle
the mesle with the pesle has the pellet of the poison; the pelly from the melly has the true that is brew!
mesle-mesle
compare (as they say in OED-land) מישמאַש | mishmosh, from מישן | mishn [to mix].
(and i’m with Matt A on the mergers and splits)
LSMFT, according to the usual unreliable sources.
I just realized I have /ɔ/ not just in Paul & mall, but also in pall & maul. What’s the point in not having the caught-cot merger if I don’t distinguish between those? I probably need to find a new way of talking (/tɔkɪn/)
For a New York shibboleth, I like “walk the dog over to the mall and get some mothballs at the hardware store.” Lots of glides everywhere, and it’s especially nice with a non-rhotic accent.
There’s a book from 2005 by Mark Southern (Contagious Couplings: Transmission of Expressives in Yiddish Echo Phrases, Westport, CT & London: Praeger), which also deals with pell mell. It’s a fabulous read, and it’s not restricted to Yiddish: it has examples of echo words etc from numerous Eurasian languages.
LSMFT = STRUT-PRICE-FLEECE-PRICE-TRAP (ignoring unstressed syllables)
Matt A, rozele: folly, holly/Holly, golly, dollie/Dolly, jolly, too?
Now I’m wondering if Paul/pall and maul/mall are homophones for those without the ubiquitous-among-Americans CLOTH-THOUGHT merger (alias father-bother)?
Introspecting on my own idiolect is of course hazardous because of that thing where your perceptions become less accurate the closer you try to focus. One possibility may be that I have (for most if not all lexemes?) a cot-caught merger before /l/ but not in other phonological contexts? Is that an actual thing that’s documented in the literature or that makes sense? Another possibility is that before /l/ (is “prelambdic” the right jargon-word) I usually (but not always) have an allophone of the THOUGHT vowel that’s sufficiently different than how it’s realized before /t/ and most other consonants that it doesn’t “sound like” the same vowel when I think about it. Possible parallel – I have a notably different vowel in “goal” than in “goat,” because the prelambdic context somehow prevents the notable fronting of the GOAT vowel that’s otherwise distinctive in my idiolect. So you could say I have a GOAL-GOAT split except that it’s definitely an allophones thing.
And of course realizations of THOUGHT in any context can vary by dialect. I can easily imagine another American speaker pronouncing “mall” with the very aggressive/distinctive THOUGHT vowel characteristic of e.g. the voice Mike Myers used for his “Linda Richman’s Cawffee Tawk” sketches. And I don’t sound like that even in words like “coffee” or “talk” where I definitely have THOUGHT rather than LOT.
Nobody has distinguished between those since Shakespeare or so! They all have THOUGHT. (No CLOTH involved.)
These all have LOT. You can tell by the inverse spelling (LOT is closer to [a] and therefore spelled with o, THOUGHT is closer to [o] and therefore spelled with a… nope, I’m not bitter at all, thank you for asking!).
Y—
Yeah, “folly, holly/Holly, golly, dollie/Dolly, jolly” all rhyme for me with Molly & Polly (all as /ɑli/), vs Paul, pall, mall, maul, fall, hall, all, awl, tall, pall, gall, Gaul, wall, ball, bawl, etc (/ɔl/)
We call them shopping centres in Ireland, but “mall” is a common sight on road signs here that say GO MALL, Irish for “slowly”, i.e. Drive slowly (go is a particle used before adjectives and adverbs). The vowels are different from any English pronunciation of those letter strings (audio files here in the three main Irish dialects), but I often wonder if visitors to the country misinterpret those signs, wondering where the mall is and how and why they should go there.
My English brother-in law remarked of the common Welsh road sign
SLOW
ARAF
that he had yet to actually see any slow arafs.
I have seen signs in the Spanish-speaking neighborhoods of San Francisco saying NO MOLESTAR, and they are very effective. Not a single mole star has been seen in years.
Linda Richman’s Cawffee Tawk
Bah. Some of Mike Myers’s guests spoke Newyorkese fluently, and were a pleasure to hear. His own accent was irritatingly amateurish. If you are a pro and want to do dialect humor, either be naturally good at it, or get a dialect coach.
Also, beating a joke to a paste is annoying too, though a signature SNL style.
No way Saturday Night Live would spring for a dialect coach. The show has always been incredibly cheaply produced.
Myers himself would, if he cared.
folly, holly/Holly, golly, dollie/Dolly, jolly
these are all definitely LOT for me, but (with JWB’s heisenbergian caveats) i have some differences in dipthongyness and (i think) fronting/rounding among Matt A’s set of THOUGHTs (gall and gaul, for example).
You cannot expect to see Slow Arafs in the plural; the sign clearly indicates that there is only One, though it’s location is currently unknown. But seriously, if it was not translating existing English wording, would Welsh have written ARAF alone spontaneously in this context? Perhaps YN ARAF would have been preferred (or the ARAFWCH seen in the standard wording ARAFWCH NAWR / REDUCE SPEED NOW)
I’m pretty confident (with etc etc caveats) that I pronounce e.g., gall and gaul completely identically (I’ve typed the one I didn’t mean before, for example, & I know how to spell them), but I don’t think I would catch a difference between them if someone else was speaking, so I have no idea what exactly the difference would be.
rozele— of the two, is it gaul that you front & round? Or is gaul rounded & gall fronted? Or…
in “gaul”, i dipthongize it a touch, moving from the “gall”* position to a rounded, slightly fronted placement.
.
* the noun (as in “oak gall”); the verb (“it galls me”) is closer to the “gaul” vowel.
rozele—
Thanks for the response! But this ends up confusing me a bit, I guess because neither gall nor gaul is really in my active vocabulary, so it’s difficult to imagine what differences there may or not be in my speech. How about ‘mall’ and ‘maul’ or ‘hall’ and ‘haul’, which are words that I actually sometimes say – would e.g., mall have a monophthong and maul be somewhat diphthongized? And would there be any difference between the noun & verb forms of maul?
Stress-conditioned allophony then, and maybe no effect of -ll vs. -ul at all.
I must say here that I’m sure I have Canadian raising in START words, so “hearty” and “hardy” are a minimal pair (given the American tongue-flap in both), but when I made a recording of myself at Mark Liberman’s request, I couldn’t hear any difference.
I, in my ESL weirdness, pronounce gaul as gall — with a bit of a glide — and gall as girl (non-rhothic, and slightly fronted). Maybe?
@Matt A: no, for me mall/maul (n)/maul (v) are all the same. i suspect that as i attend to myself under “natural” conditions, it may turn out to be all stress-related, as DM suggests, and gall/gaul are just more distinct in their rhythmic/stress environments in my idiolect.