Hope Me, Bobby-John, You’re My Only Help

Hey there, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Ronald. Hi. I’m calling you all from Columbia, South Carolina.

Wonderful. What’s on your mind?

Well, the thing that I’m thinking about, a lot of times I hear the word hope and I hear the word help.

And sometimes I hear people say, I’m going to help you with your homework.

I always thought it was, I’m going to help you with your homework.

And I said, well, maybe it’s just a regional thing or something.

But I’ve heard it pronounced and said that way many times, even from very educated people.

And so now I’m kind of confused.

I stick with, I help you.

I will help you with your homework.

But I don’t use hope in that same manner.

And I just wonder, what is the origin of that?

Okay. So people are saying the word H-E-L-P so that it sounds like the word H-O-P-E. Help sounds like hope.

Absolutely. They actually say, well, I’m going to hope her with something. I said, what do they mean I’m going to hope her with something?

Yeah, there are two things at work here. One is there’s a British dialect, old version of the verb hope that’s hanging on and has been hanging on for centuries where the past tense forms were spelled H-O-L-P or H-O-L-P-E-N.

Sometimes H-O-P-E. And they’ve hung on for centuries in little pockets throughout the United States, especially in the American South.

And those themselves are carryovers from Middle and Old English.

It’s usually the past and past participle forms.

Now, it’s not that common anymore, and when you do find it, it tends to be the older folks.

Not always, but usually.

But there’s another thing that happens, again, in the southern United States, where speakers of certain dialects, and these are regional, just like you guessed, so you got that right.

They drop l sounds before what are known by linguists as back vowels such as o those are vowels literally pronounced in the back of the mouth especially when those vowels happen before certain consonants.

So the same people that say hope instead of help might also say code instead of cold.

So they say c-o-d-e instead of c-o-l-d especially if they’re younger do you know people would you say that?

Yes, of course.

They might say hoed, sounds like H-O-A-D, instead of hold, H-O-L-D.

Oh.

Do you ever hear that?

That’s very interesting.

Yes, I have.

But I just didn’t think of it in the same manner in which you were saying it.

I just thought it was something that they just simply said.

But now this gives me more of a reason why they do what they do.

And you’re right.

The people who usually say, I will hope you, they are older, well, you know, probably middle-aged to older.

I don’t find the youth ever saying that.

Yeah, so there’s two different dialect things happening here that have some overlap, but they happen for different reasons.

So we see across the United States the older dialect patterns changing or disappearing, but new dialect patterns coming in.

And occasionally they intersect.

Okay, I really appreciate your answer because it helps to clarify better for me.

All right, be well. Take care.

Okay, goodbye.

Bye-bye.

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