I Call My Mayonnaise…

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Hi, Martha. It’s Hillary. How are you?

Hey, Hillary. I’m fine. How are you? And where are you, Hillary?

I’m about three miles from where I grew up in Woodstock, Vermont.

Okay. All right. Hi, Hillary.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you.

What’s up?

Well, I’m hoping you can help me figure out who I am.

I grew up saying the word for the salad dressing the way my mother always said it, which was mayonnaise.

And I persisted in that for many years, but never heard anyone else say it that way until I got to high school and I was on a skiing trip, and suddenly this very attractive ski instructor said, please pass me the mayonnaise.

And I said, where did you come from?

And he came from north of Boston and New Hampshire, but that didn’t solve the problem.

I recently talked to my mother’s sister, who was younger, and she said, oh, no, this did not come from granny.

Nope, this wasn’t a family thing.

And finally, I moved to New York, where I had to go to a deli to get a sandwich, and they wanted to put mayo on it.

And I really couldn’t say mayo.

I’d really like mayo.

So that was the end of it.

Now I say mayonnaise.

Now you say it two syllables instead of three.

Right?

Well, I say mayo when I say mayonnaise, yes.

Yeah, okay.

Even if you’re saying the full word, you say mayonnaise.

Two syllables?

Mayonnaise.

No, three syllables, I think.

Oh, okay.

All right.

I thought I heard two.

So your question is, where did you get that first pronunciation, and what’s wrong with you and your family?

You know, was I just a persistent idiot?

Let’s just get that out of the way.

I might tease you a little bit, Hillary, but I just want to say that pronunciation exists and it’s real and it’s valid and it happens.

It’s just not that common.

You’re special.

Yeah, no, well, you might be special, but not for that reason.

It’s just a, here’s the thing.

Let’s just address mayonnaise and the oddity that is mayonnaise.

First of all, it’s a foreignism.

And I don’t believe, in my professional opinion as a lexicographer and linguist, that mayonnaise has ever been completely anglicized.

It still has a French flavor to it, so to speak.

Okay.

I mean, when you look at it, you know it’s foreign.

Yes.

And when you hear it said, because it’s said so many different ways, you know it’s foreign.

Yep.

So that leads to people kind of guessing a little bit and never being really sure and rolling it around on their tongues and coming out with weirdness.

And that’s some of what happens.

When I look at a variety of different dictionaries, including mainstream ones and specialty ones and dialect dictionaries and some surveys on dialect pronunciations and different pronunciation maps, there are anywhere from 3 to 15 pronunciations of this word in North America, including Canada.

So there’s no one pronunciation of this word, but there are two main ways to pronounce it.

One is three syllables.

One is two syllables.

They generally have the two syllable kind of in the south of the United States and the three syllable kind of in the north.

Around New York and New England, there’s kind of mostly a three syllable pronunciation.

But the shortened form mayo, M-A-Y-O, is treated like its own word.

And it never really behaves like the longer form, no matter how you say the longer form.

Almost everyone, as far as I know, says mayo, and that’s it.

Nobody says mayo.

I had no idea.

Now you do.

You’re all caught up.

Yes, yes.

This is great.

So do you have any idea when this started, or was it just always this way?

Day one.

As soon as the French showed up with mayonnaise and people started putting on their grinders and hoagies, the chaos ensued.

Immediately.

Thank you, Hillary.

Thank you both very much.

Thank you. Take care of yourself.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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