Yes, this is silly stuff, and it’s four decades old to boot, but it’s hot and muggy for the umpteenth day in a row and I can’t come up with anything serious, so enjoy Jack Smith’s “‘Pullet Surprise’: Years later, student’s coincidence is still, uh, malapropriate” (L.A. Times, Feb. 18, 1985; archived):
I have been troubled by an Associated Press story out of Orange Park, Fla., reporting what seems to me an incredible coincidence. I wasn’t going to take note of it here, but several clippings of it have been sent to me, from various newspapers, and I feel obliged to comment.
The story said that Jim Mattson, an English teacher at Orange Park High School, had been collecting his students’ malapropisms over a period of four years–both at Orange Park and during his previous assignment in Exeter, N.H., and it gave some examples. […] What troubled me, though, was a student’s malapropism that Mattson gave as one of his favorites: “In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won the Pullet Surprise.”
“I literally fell out of my chair laughing,” he said. “I was laughing so hard I was crying. I showed it to my wife and tears came down her cheeks.”
Alas, a dedicated schoolteacher named Amsel Greene, years before, and way out in Helena, Wyo., had had pretty much the same reaction when the same sentence turned up in one of her students’ papers: “In 1957, Eugene O’Neill won a Pullet Surprise” (the only difference being an a instead of a the). Like Mattson, Miss Greene was fascinated by these strangely logical errors, and had been collecting them with the idea that someday she would publish them in a book. But what to call it?
“Here was the term,” Amsel Greene wrote in her preface, “for which I had been groping. I had jotted down hundreds of classroom misinterpretations for which I had found no name. The terms boners, bloopers and booboos imply stupidity or inadvertence, whereas student errors are often marvels of ingenuity and logic. But Pullet Surprises sparked a Eureka response. Its rightness had the impact of revelation!”
See the link for more examples and the rest of Smith’s story; I generally roll my eyes at such lists, as I wrote here:
[…] bullshit forms reminiscent of those “Kids say the darndest things!” pseudo-mistakes some people e-mail lists of (Old-timer’s disease, a blessing in the skies, Carpool tunnel syndrome—this is the title of a book, and it’s a deliberate pun, for Chrissake!, Heineken remover—which they as good as admit is bullshit, &c &c)
But I have to admit, “Pullet Surprise” made me laugh. Thanks, Trevor!
I’ve kind of done the pullet surprise one myself – heard the phrase on the radio and was confused for a moment before my mind reparsed it – so I’m not too sceptical that two other people have come up with it.
I’ve come across ‘rest bite care’ in the wild, and you’d think anyone benefitting from it would have regularly seen the word written – so there probably are some weird ones genuinely out there.
(Irrelevantly, do you really call a herring a hairing, or am I misreading that?)
“Pullet Surprise” made me laugh.
Emm, I seem to be missing something [**]. A pullet is a small fowl. I suppose one might surprise you with some antic. Or, since there’s a ‘won’ earlier in the sentence, a dressed fowl is a winning in a raffle? But ‘pullet surprise’ seems such an odd collocation, it’s no more likely than that I heard P<unrecognised>er Prize.
In contrast Old-timer’s disease does carry a reasonably close meaning to the misunderstood phrase.
[**] Ah, it’s the name of a 1997 Looney Tunes short. I did not know that. But the L.A.Times piece is 1985.
Depends on which parts of the marry-merry-Mary merger are operative, but in general a Harry who crosses the ocean does become hairy.
Since we’re on the subject of homophones… a fowl that may or may not be foul.
there probably are some weird ones genuinely out there.
Of course there are; the point is that when you hear a genuine one it’s genuinely funny, but when you read a list of supposed ones you have no way of knowing how many were made up by bored parents/teachers. If it ain’t real, it ain’t funny.
do you really call a herring a hairing, or am I misreading that?
How else would you say it? OED has /ˈhɛrɪŋ/ for both UK and US.
Wiktionary says that “airing” and “erring” are homophones in AmEng, in a way that suggests they are *not* homophones for certain sorts of foreigners. But I guess “hairing” and “herring” wouldn’t have to follow the same pattern.
Wiktionary says that “airing” and “erring” are homophones in AmEng
Not for me; I say “erring” as if it were “urring.” But surely no one says “herring” that way.
To me (Brit), *herring* and *hairing* go with *merry* and *Mary* respectively: the first vowel of *hairing* is substantially longer than that of *herring*, and has a consequent slight difference in quality.
Aha! The things I learn…
DRESS followed by /r/, vs. SQUARE (which is sorta kinda FACE followed by /r/). And marry is TRAP followed by /r/.
To me (Brit), *herring* and *hairing* go with *merry* and *Mary* respectively
Seconded (wandering Brit). I think there’s a sub-plot in a Clouseau movie involving (an) ‘erriñŋ But no confusion with ‘hairing’.
I have the impression that some merry–Mary splitters file “erring” under Mary (alongside “airing”) instead of merry. Not so with “herring”.
I’m surprised, Hat. I thought everyone knew about the pullet surprise.
Free associating now: before I had ever learned of the odd phenomenon that was Wilhelmina Stitch, I knew a parody of her, by Bridget Muller, entitled “A Fact”:
I could tell it was a parody, but did not know of what until much later.
I always thought “Pullet Surprise” was. a mondagreen.
I always thought it was pronounced “Pyuulitser”.
Mondegreen sounds about right, but I always associate it with song lyrics.
Utah Phillips described being haunted by the ghost of a chicken he had killed. He called it a poultry-geist.
Pyuulitser
Maybe the British pronounce it like that? As with nyooz/nooz?
My mother, born 1909, said there was a standard joke used when food was short.
“What’s for dinner?”
“Bread – and pull it.”
These are eggcorns, folks.
Looks like I’m not the only one:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/540286/the-right-way-to-pronounce-pulitzer
Uncyclopedia, in their venerable tradition of childish potty humor, named their grand awards the Poo Lit Surprise (fork, spoon).
A history teacher (Fred Legg) at my school back in about 1972 told us a bunch of errors he said he had collected over his years. One fits this pattern quite well: “The execution of Mary Queen of Scots was a very sworded affair”. She was executed by axe so I doubt the pupil – or teacher – was making a deliberate pun.
A different error Fred Legg informed us of doesn’t fit this pattern and was just boneheaded: the observation that “The Berlin-Baghdad railway ran from Moscow to Vladivostok”. Maybe the pupil thought “Berlin-Baghdad” was a company name… after all, the Paris-Dakar Rally, now just called the Dakar Rally, has for many years been run in South America or Saudi Arabia and has nothing to do with Dakar (or Paris).
(Edited to make it plain Fred Legg was the name of the teacher, not of the school – first version said “A history teacher at my school (Fred Legg) back in about 1972”).
I always thought it was pronounced “Pyuulitser”.
Many people do, which is understandable and entirely forgivable unless the person in question is paid to know correct pronunciations (e.g., radio and TV announcers).
How inconsiderate.
The “Pullitz” in Moravia* from which the Pulitzer surname is derived got its toponym de-Teutonized due to the political vicissitudes of the post-Hapsburg era and is now known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_(T%C5%99eb%C3%AD%C4%8D_District). Which is presumably not pronounced by the locals anything like the English noun with the same spelling …
*Before crossing the Atlantic to the U.S. the relevant line of the family had relocated from Moravia to Hungary.
@Jen in Edinburgh
> I’ve come across ‘rest bite care’ in the wild, and you’d think anyone benefitting from it would have regularly seen the word written – so there probably are some weird ones genuinely out there.
Is that supposed to be respite care? But that sounds nothing like bite?
Pulitzer is called 퓰리처 Pyullicheo in Korean, presumably because someone thought it was pronounced [ˈpjʊlɪtsɚ] and the spelling stuck. It’s in the official dictionary and everything. It really should be 풀리처 Pullicheo if we’re going by [ˈpʊlɪtsɚ] as the correct pronunciation.
Is that supposed to be respite care? But that sounds nothing like bite?
The first UK pronunciation given for respite in the OED is /ˈrɛspʌɪt/ (RESS-pight).
If English-speking kids do dictations in school, then pullet surprises must occur very frequently.
But i”m not sure they do.
> The first UK pronunciation given for respite in the OED is /ˈrɛspʌɪt/ (RESS-pight).
My less venerable sources seem to disagree between first and second for the UK, but indeed it’s clearly there in black and white. I’d swear I learned the word from UK English in any case, but no matter.
What is the other pronunciation? I’m pronouncing it [ri’spʌɪt], which is probably totally wrong…
respIte with short e, stress on first syllable and short i or schwa for the i.
Thanks!
As in “Respite! Respite and nepenthe, from these memories of Lenore!”
I would just say “respite” rhymes with “despot,” but that may be imprudently assuming that everyone else pronounces “despot” like I do!
It assumes the rabbit-abbot merger, which is very widespread in the US.
How about “cesspit”?
Perfect.
I definitely say “RESS-pight” (UK person) and that’s what I think I have always heard from fellow Brits. Not resspit rhymes with cesspit.
I tend to pronounce “despot” with an unreduced vowel in the second syllable as /ˈdɛspɒt/, so it doesn’t work as a rhyme for me.
Most dictionaries give both /ˈdɛspɒt/ and /ˈdɛspət/ as possible pronunciations but differ regarding the preference. Merriam-Webster gives /ˈdɛspət/ first, but Longman gives /ˈdɛspɒt/ first for both the UK and US pronunciations. For Collins and the Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation it is /ˈdɛspɒt/ and /ˈdɛspət/ is only a US variant, but the OED and the AHD give /ˈdɛspət/ as the only pronunciation.
I think I have secondary stress on the last syllable of “cesspit” but not “respite”, and Merriam-Webster agrees.
i seem to lack the cesspit-despot merger myself, but i support it on ideological grounds.
Being American, it would. British lexicographers have an odd aversion to marking post-tonic secondary stresses: Wells (1, 2), for instance, argues that the rhythmical difference between selfish and shellfish lies only in their differing syllabification – self.ish, shell.fish – and the consequent pre-fortis clipping in the former, with their final rimes being identical. The implication that Elvish, selvage, etc. would cluster phonetically with shellfish over selfish shows, in my view, the deficiency of this approach.
Longman gives /ˈdɛspɒt/ first for both the UK and US pronunciations
It does indeed, but that’s not right. /ɒ/ is not a phoneme in Standard AmE. A typo?
No it doesn’t. LPD (3rd ed) gives -ɑːt as the American main pronunciation.
Ah. I was looking at the second edition (2000). A typo, then.
Not that it matters here, but isn’t it the THOUGHT vowel?
Standard American THOUGHT/CROSS can be rendered as /ɒ(ː)/ to reflect its low quality and disaggregation from NORTH/FORCE, but it’s not the same phoneme as the non-North American / diaphonemic /ɒ/. (I believe Longman uses /ɒː/ for it.)
I was looking at the second edition (2000).
This scan of the 2000 edition has -ɑːt for the primary US pronunciation. It’s also marked “Ninth impression 2007”, so probably the other one was a typo that was caught between printings.
Longman uses ɔː for THOUGHT (UK and US), ɑː for LOT (US). (The introduction notes that “LPD follows tradition” in distinguishing those two for GenAm.)
Longman’s online dictionary uses /ɒː/ for US THOUGHT.
I have the second edition of the LPD at home, but I’m travelling at the moment so won’t be able to check it until next week.
I was just using the IPA symbols to stand for the phonemes of English roughly the way it is done currently on Wikipedia, which represents the phonemes the same way regardless of accent despite the differences in pronunciation.
So the LOT vowel is written /ɒ/ regardless of the accent of English we’re dealing with even though [ɑ] would be more phonetically accurate in AmE. The same system uses /oʊ/ as the symbol for the GOAT vowel, even though [əʊ] is more accurate for BrE. I’m so used to this from Wikipedia that I sometimes forget that it’s confusing for other people who are only used to accent-specific phonetic transcriptions. Maybe I should have stuck to respellings.
Longman’s online dictionary uses /ɒː/ for US THOUGHT.
Thanks. I’ll have to be more careful to say “LPD” for the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary by John Wells, rather than just “Longman”, and “LDOCE” for the general dictionary. And — according to the foreword to the second edition — Wells himself had used ɒː for AmE THOUGHT in the first edition (1990), but changed it to ɔː in the second.
LDOCE online also has /ˈdespət/ listed first for AmE “despot”. No doubt there are many such small discrepancies between this and LPD. (I say it with unreduced AmE LOT vowel myself.)
My immediate reaction was that I say /ˈdespət/ but then I thought “Do I?” and realized I can’t remember the last time I said the word aloud, so it may be a moot point.
One possible complication is that per the google books ngram viewer “despotic” is consistently more common over time (albeit not by a huge margin) that plain “despot.” So if oral use tracks print use, people would hear “despotic,” which I take it has an unreduced LOT vowel in the stressed second syllable for pretty much everyone [?], more commonly, which may or may not then influence their pronunciation of “despot.”
It’s obviously not unprecedented for an adjective transparently derived from a noun to be used more frequently than the underlying noun, but is there a name for that phenomenon, or any literature on how common or uncommon it is?
The only time I remember saying “despot” recently is when referring to the US chain Office Depot as “Office Despot” (because why not). I think I use [ɑ̝ː] (with a secondary stress), not an unstressed [ǝ], but that may be to try to highlight the joke.
@Jongseong Park: That approach could be called diaphonemic, yeah. I forget the exact Wikipedia/Wiktionary conventions, but you can see things like /æˑ/ for BATH, /ɒˑ/ for CLOTH, etc. It bumps up against limitations fairly quickly – e.g. two dialects might define the boundaries of BATH or CLOTH differently – but it can work well enough in certain contexts.
I’ve had occasion to imagine the word more recently (though not to say it aloud).
I’ve had occasion to imagine the word …
Yes. Whether or not @Hat has said the word recently, I _hear_ the word pretty often in U.S. news commentary. Also “U.S. conservatives embrace ‘acceptable despot’ Hungary’s Orbán …” — not that he’s the only despot they’re embracing.
(I stress ‘despot’ on the first syllable, BTW.)
Everyone seems to stress the first syllable; the variation is in what happens to the vowel in the second syllable as a consequence.
These days I probably hear “despot” aloud most frequently as chanted in a religious context in Greek, albeit Greek as chanted by chanters who are primarily Anglophones which no doubt affects the vowels. (The Greek word is not pejorative and remains a respectful way of addressing a bishop.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton_Despotin
Modern Greek so often gets left in the cold with all the other Europeans giving different senses to their words.
Lenehan extended his hands in protest.
– But my riddle! he said. What opera is like a railway line?
– Opera? Mr O’Madden Burke’s sphinx face reriddled.
Lenehan announced gladly:
– The Rose of Castille. See the wheeze? Rows of cast steel. Gee!
He poked Mr O’Madden Burke mildly in the spleen. Mr O’Madden Burke fell back with grace on his umbrella, feigning a gasp.
– Help! he sighed. I feel a strong weakness.
Lenehan, rising to tiptoe, fanned his face rapidly with the rustling tissues.
As with erring, many in Ozland say rear as “rair” when it’s about the rearing or raising of young, etc. I guess this is because of over-sensitivity about other meanings of euphemistic rear. Grimace is also pronounced uncertainly.
As for despot, I always give full weight to the second syllable. I feel queasy when people don’t – just as I experience disgust (dɪsˈɡʌst, never dɪzˈɡʌst) at ˈeɡzət for exit (a pronunciation for which LPD reports 45% among BrE and 52% among AmE speakers. Similarly with eggzistential. We all have our weaknesses. Respite I simply avoid, and I keep forgetting how desultory and kalashnikov go, so I check before speaking.
For asia LPD reports just 9% saying ˈeɪʃə as opposed to ˈeɪʒə in AmE, and 36% in BrE. It also gives a chart for BrE showing that ˈeɪʒə is correlated negatively with age. In Australia ˈeɪʒə is definitely the norm. As for equation, it reports that 10% of AmE speakers say iˈkweɪʃən rather than iˈkweɪʒən. My father to his credit used to say iˈkweɪʃən against the universal Australian custom (most would say it only when something other than a mathematical equation is meant), and I emulate that when I remember to.
+ )
@Noetica: If you’re up on your breads, just remember that kalashnikov is the son of the guy who bakes the kalach.
On equation, I (US) also distinguish the two senses – /ʒ/ for mathematics, /ʃ/ for the act of equating. It reminds me of some stress alternations that I have, like ‘intersection for a road crossing vs. inter’section for other senses, or ‘survey (v.) for administering a questionnaire vs. sur’vey (v.) for other senses.
David Marjanović: “It assumes the rabbit-abbot merger, which is very widespread in the US.”
AFAIK, it is not, though I can see how someone used to UK varieties may think so.
Here is one relevant paper:
https://web.mit.edu/flemming/www/paper/rosasroses.pdf
From that very paper:
(My emphasis.)
In fact, they only claim a distinction in cases like roses versus Rosa’s, where the lower “schwa” vowel is carried over from a word-final schwa when plural or possessive s is added (which is, incidentally, a very interesting finding in itself, from a morphophonemic standpoint.)
How do US Hatters say “ninja’d”?
Does that dreadful book The Sound Pattern of English claim that (US) English only has one reduced vowel? (Asking because I got rid of my copy years ago.)
I note the linked paper’s attempt at a hypothesis-saving epicycle in suggesting that UK RP “rabbit” has a secondary stress on the second syllable, whereas “abbot” presumably doesn’t. What is it with linguists at MIT?
@FJ: I think a proper rabbit–abbot distinction would be unusual in the US. In my experience the current young-ish GenAm pattern is to merge them within words, often to a near-high [ᵻ] (you’ll see people preferentially write it as i in spelling pronunciations, giving “abbit” for abbot), with only morpheme-final instances reliably taking /ə/ – thus the roses–Rosa’s distinction.
My accent is too corrupted by deliberate and semi-deliberate tinkering to be a useful datapoint, but I take a more “bookish” distribution, merging the word-internal cases to /ə/ (and thus, perhaps unusually for an American, merging roses–Rosa’s) except in a few “preserving” contexts like final -ic, -ist, -ish and -age (which, oddly, gives me a basest–bassist distinction not even present in RP). The use of [ə] in -ist is something that I strongly associate with Australians and New Zealanders, by the way.
[DE: I fixed the formatting in your Flemming/Johnson quote; hope you don’t mind.]
On the contrary, I am honoured. (Also struggling with mobile phones and dodgy internet here in la France profonde. All help gratefully received.)
Australia’s notorious “No Asians” ad.
@David Eddyshaw
Ha! I read the whole thing a long time ago. Totally forgot about that line.
Anyway, my millennial US informant say they use the roses, ‘barred i’, vowel in rabbit, i.e. rabbit and abbot do not rhyme for them.
My impression is that this is true for most US speakers.
One’s own impressions are notoriously unreliable in such matters.
That’s your impression, at any rate.
Or is it??
I feel that it ought to be said that “Pullet Surprise” is a much better name than “Pulitzer Prize” in any case. They should change it.
I’ve seen it spelled descust.
(There’s also distain out there, among other revealing spellings I can’t remember at the moment.)
God bless America, [ɪ]xcept Balt[ə]more.
(Google found it immediately. I’m amazed.)
From the paper:
It seems to have gone the other way around: using the symbol ə for all reduced vowels (not even just the unrounded ones!) unless you really had to resort to something else seems to have been a founding principle of the IPA, with the primary motivation being to use it for the reduced vowels of both English and French regardless of the obvious and consistent phonetic difference between the two. I’m not surprised if people forgot this was supposed to be just a printing-friendly convention.
Also perhaps of interest:
The commas in the paper are a mess, BTW. There are many sentences I had to read twice.