Both and “Bolth”

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Roger from San Francisco.

Hi, Roger. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Roger.

Well, thank you very much. I’m wondering if you can help me with my deflated ego today.

Well, of course we can. You look great. I love that shirt.

Nice shoes.

The tie matches your eyes.

I feel better already, but let me tell you what happened to me recently.

I had my fatherly and my intellectual bubble burst when my 29-year-old reader-writer daughter pointed out recently that her younger sister,

See, it ought to be okay, it’s her younger sister, not me, that she pronounces a word incorrectly.

And it’s such a common four-letter, one-syllable word.

It talks about the two of us.

I’ll even spell it for you before I pronounce it.

It’s B-O-T-H.

B-O-T-H.

How could you mess that up?

Well, I’ll tell you.

You add an extra L sound right in the middle, kind of make it sound like soup bowl,

And put a T-H on the end, and now you have both.

Both.

And that’s how I say it.

Oh, both.

And you know where my daughter gets it from?

Where?

Well, Dad, you pronounce it that way, too.

I’m completely devastated.

Oh, so not only are you messed up, but you’ve messed up your daughter’s psyche.

Evidently, evidently.

Yeah.

Oh, boy.

So I thought I could ask my mom and dad, but they were already gone.

They passed on.

I figured I must have got it someplace.

My next choice was then to call Grant and Martha and say,

You’ve got to let me off the hook here.

You were going to call both of us?

Surely it’s something regional or something in my background.

Well, I will tell you, Roger, I’m going to talk just for a second about how we produced this show.

We got an email from you about this, and we decided to talk to you on the subject, right?

And so we’re talking now because of that.

And so what I did is I put a survey online and asked the Internet at large how they pronounce the word B-O-T-H.

And so I’m looking at the data right now, and you will be relieved to know that 10% of the people who’ve taken the survey self-report,

That is, they claim that they also pronounce it as if there’s an L in the word.

Wow, they actually admitted it, huh?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, 10%?

10%.

That seems like a lot.

Yeah, it’s not bad.

I thought we’d hear from two people.

We’d hear from both of them.

I don’t know if there’s only 270-plus respondents so far.

I think we’ll get some more.

I don’t know if we have enough data here to make any conclusions about regional accents or variants or dialects and so forth.

But so far, nobody east of, say, Detroit claims to pronounce it that way.

And notice all the caveating and hedging there because sometimes people don’t know that they’re saying it that way and somebody else is in your case.

Well, I guess that was a surprise for me, Grant,

And it is that I lived 40, almost 50 years of my life and then completely unaware of that.

And I don’t even remember really hearing somebody mispronounce it.

I’ve heard people say it like with a rhyme with O for something like both.

I’ve never heard that L sound in there until somebody pointed it out.

Let me ask you a question.

What state is Seattle in?

Seattle is in Washington.

And after you go to the bathroom, you should wet your hands.

You should wash your hands.

I don’t sneak that R in there, do I?

I was looking for it.

You know why?

There is some data in the journals, in the academic journals,

That suggest that people who also say wash instead of wash

Or Washington instead of Washington also do this with the L.

This is called intrusive L or L-epenthesis, E-P-E-N-T-H-E-S-I-S, L-epenthesis.

What this is is when you insert a letter or a sound in a word where it doesn’t ordinarily belong.

That is, etymologically, there’s no reason for that letter ever to have been there.

You know, I apologize for my intrusive L.

Yeah, I’ve got a bad case of apenthesis.

I’m sorry.

Oh, I’m sorry.

Are you seeing a doctor for it?

A little cream will clear that up.

I’m sorry.

I knew you guys would make me feel better.

Yeah, you do?

You do feel better?

Well, you know, evidently some people out there are like really incensed or upset about it.

I found recently that there’s actually a group on Facebook.

Oh, there are three groups on Facebook.

And the name of the group is B-O-T-H, not B-O-L-T-H.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they have the word both written with a circle and a slash through it.

Yeah, exactly.

But I see here that there is a response group to that, which is called both is so a legitimate pronunciation of both.

So that’s another group of people who decide that both is fine.

I had no idea. I’m going to have to join that group.

Yeah, you will.

You guys have come to the rescue again.

We aim to please.

Thank you for calling us. I’m so glad we could help, Roger.

All right. Thanks to you both. I appreciate it. I really enjoy the show.

All right. Peace out.

I enjoy both of you.

Thanks a lot, Roger.

Bye-bye.

You’re welcome. Bye-bye now.

We would love to hear about the thing that you pronounce incorrectly.

It’s kind of like fieldwork, Martha, isn’t it?

When somebody mispronounces something, it’s not necessarily a chance to condemn or to get angry.

You just look at it and say, all right, what’s the machinery behind this?

How did that happen?

And do other people do it too?

Yeah, it’s like, whoa, cool.

We’d like to help you with that.

1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.