Ben Yagoda has an enlightening Not One-Off Britishisms post about the pronunciation of the word primer:
I’m not speaking about the preliminary coat of paint but the word defined by Merriam-Webster as “a small book for teaching children to read; a small introductory book on a subject; a short informative piece of writing.” The dictionary gives the American pronunciation as rhyming with “dimmer,” and British as rhyming with “climber.” (Which is how both countries pronounce the paint thing.) […]
As explained by Anne Curzan and Rebecca Kruth in their radio feature “That’s What They Say,”
The “primmer” pronunciation came into English from the Latin term “primarius” which meant “first.” This word can be traced back in written forms of English to the late 1300s. It originally referred to a Christian prayer book for laypeople (as opposed to clergy) that was often used to teach reading. By the 1500s, there are versions of these books that are only used to teach children to read.
In Britain, they go on, the “prye-mer” pronunciation emerged in the nineteenth century and became the dominant one in the twentieth, but “primmer” held on in the U.S.
Until recently, that is. On Facebook, I asked people how they pronounced the word and the results were illuminating. For the most part, it broke down by age: most of the people over 60 said “primmer,” and most under 60, “prye-mer.” The only non-American who responded was an English woman who has lived in the U.S. for some decades, and who said, “I don’t recall ever hearing ‘primmer.’” Of course, the word doesn’t come up that much.
I, of course (being a Yank well over 60), say “primmer,” and once upon a time I had the itch to correct people who pronounced it as if it were a coat of paint, but happily long years of promoting descriptivist attitudes (in myself as well as among the general public) have quelled the urge. Let the young folks say it as they like, and if it makes me twitch, well, it’s good not to sit still all the time.
I can’t resist quoting this 2014 comment by zythophile about yet another sort of primer:
‘“burjóys” for bourgeoise’ – when type sizes had names, rather than being distinguished by their height in points, “bourgeois”, “a size of printing-type measuring about 100 lines to the foot, next larger than brevier and smaller than long-primer”, ie about 9pt, was pronounced “burjoyce”. Mind, “long-primer was pronounced “long-primmer” and brevier “breever”, while the size two down from brevier, nonpareil, was pronounced “non-prul”; what you might call a plethora of shibboleths.
“A plethora of shibboleths” is a primo phrase.
Oh, and a quibble: primarius does not mean ‘first’ but ‘first-rank, first-rate, principal, excellent.’
I am an AmEng speaker just barely under 60 and would pronounce the genre of instructional book the same as the paint. But I wonder if that’s a spelling pronunciation on my part? I can’t swear I’ve ever heard the word in the book sense said out loud. It had fallen out of pedagogical fashion (as a label, at least) some decades before I started elementary school. By contrast, the paint sense is definitely one I’ve heard said aloud since childhood. And of course “prime” is pronounced differently than “prim” in AmEng and the book sense of “primer” seems to go with the former rather than the latter.
I’ve always said them the same (born in the UK) and have wondered how the different pronunciations in US came about, since (as far as I can see) it’s the same word. As JWB suggests, primer as a coat of paint prepares the surface for a finish coat, and primer as a book prepares the student for the lessons.
I think primer is now rarely used in the strict sense of “elementary textbook”, but still common in extended use, as in an article in today’s Guardian, where the primer amounts to just two sentences:
I take it Hat would pronounce that as “primmer”?
primer as a book prepares the student for the lessons.
That’s an appealing idea, but it’s folk etymology. The word is from post-classical Latin primarius, primarium ‘prayer book or devotional manual’; OED:
Note the spelling with -mm- in 1434 “Y bequethe to Robert Sharp, goddis child..a prymmer for to serve god with” (in F. J. Furnivall, Fifty Earliest English Wills).
I take it Hat would pronounce that as “primmer”?
Quite so.
This reminds me of placer, as in gold. In California people are more likely to learn the “plasser” pronunciation, because of history classes and Placer County, but I imagine rarely elsewhere.
The word is from post-classical Latin primarius…
A revelation, sir! I’d always lazily assumed the two primers were the same word that had acquired different pronunciations to distinguish the two uses.
I didn’t know that the US pronunciation of the book was changing. Had I known, I would have asked the 11-year-old grandchild of a friend who I happened to be talking to at the weekend.
Somewhere on my shelves I have a 19th-century edition of an early 16th-century Prymer (in English: I think that’s the spelling it uses, although of course like many 16th-century works it may not even be internally consistent in its orthography …).
This reminds me of placer, as in gold. In California people are more likely to learn the “plasser” pronunciation, because of history classes and Placer County, but I imagine rarely elsewhere.
A good comparison! Having gone to school in California, I naturally pronounce it “plasser,” and I never thought about how unintuitive that is.
A former house painter, to me a paint preparation primer and instruction primer were different sounds.
So far, I have not found a poetry rhyme for the New England Primer, but, if such exists, it could suggest some pronunciation history.
I’m slightly older than JWB, but I use the “primmer” pronunciation. It’s hard for words to retain unexpected pronunciations after they fall out of use and are encountered only rarely and mostly in print. Maybe “plover” and “clapboard” fall into the same category, though neither is really part of my active vocabulary.
I’m well under 60, and did actually first learn the word with [ɪ]. But now I’ve got the diphthongal pronunciation. I’m not sure if that’s just generational pressure at work, or influence from living in England for a few years (while working in an academic context where people would actually use this word from time to time). My phonology is overall not very much influenced by my time in England,* but I wonder if it’s easier to pick up one-off transfers of what lexical set a word (especially a fairly rare one) belongs to.
*(Well, at least I don’t think so. But I did have the strange experience of coming back to my hometown in Wisconsin one summer and having the cashier at Kwik Trip ask me where I was from. So I guess I might have sounded furrin enough to a more committed local.)
i’m in my late 40s, and say “primmer”. i suspect that i learned it from being read aloud to as a kid from the Little House books, which i’ve recently discovered very few of my friends under 40 have had any contact with, or possibly from even earlier texts (Little Women, say) that i think fell similarly out of fashion at around the same time.
i say “play-sir” for the mining technique, but that’s certainly a spelling pronunciation (as a new englander, i think the only place i could’ve heard it with its proper regional vowel would’ve been in a folk song, but the protagonist of Acres of Clams has tunneled, hydraulicked, and cradled, but not placered as far as i can remember.
I have not found a poetry rhyme for the New England Primer
There is no schoolbook grimmer
Than the New England primer
It elicits nary a glimmer
But makes my insides simmer
(Traditional doggerel, circa 2024)
“the Little House books, which i’ve recently discovered very few of my friends under 40 have had any contact with”
If there is a trailing off in exposure, I wonder if you’re a half decade or so off on the timing — I’m a few years shy of 40 still, and those books were ubiquitous when I was a kid.
And of course in Bulgarian пример means an example or an instance of something, canonically pronounced [ˈpri.mɛ̝̈r] in the most stereotypical ’80s TV teacher’s voice.
Same word in Russian (though the stress there is on the final syllable); both are from Slavic *měra ‘measure.’
I know — Мѣра споредъ мѣра 🙂 I just thought to butt in with the pronunciation discussion. I don’t think they’re etymologically related?
No, but I always enjoy a bit of Slavic for flavoring!
And of course there is the case of the time-travel film Primer — I think it made sense for it to be pronounced “prye-mer”, because the were arguing about which of the time-travelles was the “prime” (as in, not the original function but the first derivative) — and are thus better for having experienced just one more timeline… and _then_ it gets weird. Mathematically. I should ask qntm if he has seen it — I never got it from his writing, and had I not met him and him telling me explicitly that it was based on discontinuities I would not have seen the parallels.
EDIT: sorry, I rambled on, and did not get to the point that I meant that I found it funny that the -er in “primer” was reanalyzed as an English comparative in the name of the film. EDIT: In some interpretations of the plot! There are many.
Primer is such a weird film. I was on a panel with several other faculty members who were knowledgeable about both science and science fiction. We watched the movie, then talked about it with the rest of the audience. The first half of Primer is one of the most carefully thought out attempts to do a hard science fiction story about time travel. The second half completely drops the logic, presumably so the filmmakers can surprise the audience by having a bunch of stuff happen that would have seemed as impossible earlier in the film as in real life.
I’d been wanting to see it for years, and when I finally saw it last year it was a letdown. Techbro dudes babbling techbro babble (and talking over each other, so half the time you have no idea what they’re saying) and a plot too complicated for the running time (which is, to be fair, mercifully short).
It _was_ mostly techbros doing thechbro stuff for thechbro reasons. The thing is, they’re still idiot techbros, and the things that happen to them are because they’re techbros and have their weird techbro patterns of behaviour — I think that’s the whole point of the film (if there is one, and I agree with Brett that there is a sharp discontinuity around the middle) — give techbros time travel and see how they fuck up their narcissistic lives.
I too am a little older than J.W.B. and I’m sure I learned monophthongal “primer” in elementary school, not because we used one but because we learned about what American children of the past did in school, with hornbooks and then the New England Primer. Later I knew someone who had written a book with “primer” in the title.
@David L.: Thank you for solving that problem.
I didn’t encounter the word “primer” (meaning the book) consciously until I was a teenager, and the different pronunciations threw me for a loop–if you’d given me both and asked me which was the British version, I’d confidently have said “primmer”. I guess I was basing it off of a combination of expecting the British version to not use a long vowel (as with “privacy” and “vitamin”) and associating “prim” with being British.
Is there a difference between prime-r as a folk etymology for the book sense, which is being extended to thinks like “you need a primer” in general, and prime-r being used metaphorically that way with some help from re-analysis of the book sense?
Rapidly approaching seventy, originally from rural central coast California: “prye-mer” (in all senses) and “plasser” for me.
@Nelson: the folks i’ve been talking with (because of reading caroline fraser’s Prairie Fires) have been in their mid-30s and from pretty different flavors of white northeastern upbringing; i expect there’s a lot of regional, social, and just personal variation.
Apparently, matrix as a printing term can also be pronounced as /ˈmætrɪks/ with the TRAP vowel. Another printing jargon that might throw off the uninitiated is leading /ˈlɛdɪŋ/ with the DRESS vowel, which comes from the fact that the space between lines of text would be increased by inserting strips of lead.
Canadian, mid-60s. Never heard the primmer pronunciation before, or perhaps I have and have blanked it out due to the shock.
@Robert Hutchison: ‘if you’d given me both and asked me which was the British version, I’d confidently have said “primmer”’
The British are indeed primmer and properer than we are.
Slightly younger than JW and similar geographical background I also say „prye-mer“ for both.
I am familiar with the „primmer“ pronunciation but always assumed that was a stuffy British usage. Just checked with my wife, and she also assumed „primmer“ is British. That seems to be a generalized Gen X misapprehension that perhaps led us all to move to “prye-mer”.
I listened to Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, on Audible. The (AmE) narrator got a lot of stick in the reviews for using primmer (the word comes up a lot of course)–although not a few listeners came to her defence, citing the AmE usage. Now I (BrE) learn that it’s contentious even in AmE!
I heard/learnt the “primmer” pronunciation a long time ago. I assumed it was British and was disconcerted that no one ever used it (although the chance to ever hear or use the word is close to zero). So now I can say ‘pry-mer’ with confidence 🙂
Always assumed the other one was ‘play ser’.
My husband (44) and I (55) use the short vowel for the book and long vowel for the paint, so I guess we’re really 60 or over.
Never heard of “primmer” before this. I approve, on the lectio difficilior principle, and may adopt the pronunciation myself pour épater les anglais.
How is Primer the convoluted time-travel movie pronounced by USians? (I forget in what sense the word applies to the plot, which I vaguely recall as ingenious but devoid of any actual human interest.)
Another printing jargon that might throw off the uninitiated is leading /ˈlɛdɪŋ/ with the DRESS vowel, which comes from the fact that the space between lines of text would be increased by inserting strips of lead.
Heh. Having worked in the publishing industry for many years, that one is so natural to me I’m a bit shocked to be reminded it’s unintuitive for most people.
How is Primer the convoluted time-travel movie pronounced by USians? (I forget in what sense the word applies to the plot, which I vaguely recall as ingenious but devoid of any actual human interest.)
That’s another thing that annoyed me about the movie — I watched the whole thing and still had no idea how to pronounce the title (or indeed how it applies to the plot).
And how about other uses of primer, for example primer in molecular biology – are they all “primmer” in en-US? Including professionals that regularly use it – like molecular biologists?
The OED has it under primer², the same as the “substance or mixture used to prime wood, metal, canvas, etc.” sense, so the presumption is that it would be pronounced the same (like “prime”), but of course it would be great if professionals that regularly use it would weigh in.
I (UK, 72) first encountered the word in an English translation of ‘Pinocchio’ – later in my childhood I used Kennedy’s ‘Shorter Latin Primer’. I have never heard it pronounced ‘primmer’, nor have I come across ‘placer’ as a mining term.
@rozele, I can imagine those books might have remained popular longer in the Midwest.
@gido: No sense of primer except the “small book” one gets the distinctive short vowel pronunciation. Certainly when I see the word without context (like when I first saw the title of this post), I envision it with the diphthong. (And the meaning related to DNA replication was actually the first one that popped into me head when I read the title, before even the paint meaning.)
Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
I suppose, if the current UK pronunciation did only become prevalent in the twentieth century, you could actually make a good case that the neo-Victorians behind the eponymous Primer would naturally have resurrected the older pronunciation too.
A quibble with your quibble: in medieval Latin—and that is the Latin that is relevant in this instance—primarius did not just mean ‘first-rank, first-rate, principal, excellent’ but also most of the senses of modern ‘primary’, including ‘first, original (w. ref. to subsequent development or change)’, according to the DMLBS entry here:
https://logeion.uchicago.edu/primarius
Fair enough, and quibbles about quibbles are always welcome!
Just yesterday I was mocked for pronouncing ‘Forsythia’ with a long ‘y’, as in scythe, rather than a short ‘i’, which is how Americans generally say it. I was quick to point out that the plant is named after a person — specifically (as Wikipedia told me when I got home) — William Forsyth.
So how did the short i pronunciation arise? You wouldn’t say the name Forsyth like that.
I suspect the form of shortening found in Christmas, Michaelmas, etc.
Likely a case of trisyllabic laxing informed by the unusualness of /aɪ/Cia – cf. Scythia. For a really odd case see fuchsia /ˈfjuːʃə/; I think the typical pronunciation of the surname in the US is /fjuːks/, where normal patterns would yield /fʌks/ or /fʊks/. (Many, perhaps most, avoided this problem by anglicizing it to Fox.)
Any pronunciation of a scientific name based on a personal name will be criticized if not mocked.
Of course there’s a reason that English speakers named Fuchs don’t pronounce it /fʌks/ or seldom if ever even /fʊks/. But I suspect that in the usual American pronunciation of fuchsia, misreading it with “sch” is also involved.
Also, thanks to languagehat for the pronunciation of Michaelmas, which I’d been mispronouncing in my head all these years.
@Jerry Friedman: instances of the fairly obvious eye-dialect spelling “micklemuss” are not entirely non-existent, but they’re rarer than one might have supposed.
Looking forward to the adaptation of Dickens’ Michaelmas Mickleby starring Nads Nicholson.
Friend of mine, fellow linguistics student, ~50 years ago: “My mother always inserts an n in ‘forsythia.'”
Me: “Forsynthia.’
She, laughing: “Everyone knows where to put it!”
@Y — This reminds me of placer, as in gold. In California people are more likely to learn the “plasser” pronunciation, because of history classes and Placer County, but I imagine rarely elsewhere.
WHAT!!! I grew up in (Southern) California, we must have talked about it in history class, and I’ve been to Placer County multiple times (to visit Lake Tahoe) — but if people have ever used the short-a pronunciation around me I never noticed!! I think I learned the place name from reading maps, or possibly road signs, so I followed normal AmEng phonological rules to guess it’s pronunciation. And no one has ever corrected me (until now).
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Also I’ve always used the long-i pronunciation of “primer”, but I’m younger than most of this blog’s commentariat, I think (just turned 30). I’m not sure I’ve even heard the short-“i” pronunciation; though it’s possible I did and merely forgot/dismissed it as dialect variation (which, I guess this post says it is…)
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@rozele I also grew up reading the Little House Books and Little Women (and Ramona Quimby), but I don’t know if that was unusual among my peer group. I’m pretty sure I read them at my mom’s recommendation/selection (this would have been across the age-range/transition to reading by myself). I don’t remember primer-as-in-lesson-books coming up in them, but I don’t remember the books very well.
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@Jongseong Park — matrix-with-short-“a” is almost as surprising to me as Placer-with-short-“a”; but I have heard about leading-with-short-“e” from somewhere 😛
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@yonray — oh good shout! I love that book, have talked about it with lots of scifi-reading friends (my age to maybe my dad’s age, so late-20s to early 60s right now). We don’t always say the full title but I’m pretty sure it’s come up enough to be pretty confident that all my interlocutors have said “primer” with a long-“i”. I hadn’t heard about the audiobook controversy but I don’t go in for audiobooks much.
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@David L — So how did the short i pronunciation arise? You wouldn’t say the name Forsyth like that.
I have no intuition for whether “Forsyth” as a name should be pronounced with /aɪ/ or /ɪ/
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TIL about Michaelmas too; and now I’m wondering if anyone says it like “Mitchell-mass”