Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we're going to talk about a tricky pronunciation in a game called The Dozens.
A couple of weeks ago, I pronounced the name of a keyboard instrument as pianoforte, and I did it on purpose, after checking multiple dictionaries.
I always thought it was pronounced pianoforte, but I often check pronunciations when it's not a word I use every day and dictionaries seemed to tell me otherwise.
It was clear there were multiple possible pronunciations, but pianoforte seemed to be the one most dictionaries favored for American English.
But it turns out, a lot of you thought it was pianoforte too, and there is a similar, more common word that also causes confusion, so let's learn more.
First, for pianoforte, pianoforte, here's an overview of what I found.
Merriam-Webster and Dictionarycom both put the pronunciation pianoforte first, but both follow it with other acceptable pronunciations, such as pianoforte.
Dictionary.com actually has five possible pronunciations, and the Oxford English Dictionary has two different British pronunciations, pianoforte, first, and pianoforte, second.
So that's an interesting exercise, but you probably don't talk about pianoforts or pianofortes very often.
There's also a more common word, though, that has the same problem.
F-O-R-T-E.
As in, oh yes, grammar is my forte.
Or is that grammar is my fort?
Or if you're British, it might be your fortee.
And besides referring to a strength, this word can also mean to play something loudly in music.
The pronunciation problem here arose because this one word with the single spelling is actually two different words borrowed into English from two different sources.
The first F-O-R-T-E entered English from French in the 1600s.
It originally referred to the strongest part of a sword blade, the section between the middle and the hilt.
The opposite end, near the tip, was called the foible, which now means a minor weakness.
So we got both words from fencing.
From that literal meaning fort developed a metaphorical sense your strong point, the thing you do best.
And because this word came from French, where it's spelled without the E on the end, the traditional English pronunciation was one syllable, like fort.
I'm told that in French, you don't pronounce the T on the end, so it's more like fort.
The second forte.
The musical term came from Italian, probably in the early 1700s, as a term meaning loud.
It's the opposite of piano, which means soft.
When musicians see the marking F or forte in a score, they play that passage loudly.
It is spelled with an E at the end in Italian, and in that language the word has always been pronounced with two syllables forte.
And this is where things got complicated.
In English, both words ended up with the same spelling.
And over time, the Italian pronunciation started bleeding into the French-derived word.
As Michael Quinion notes, at Worldwide Words, the influence of the Italian word is quote too strong and is winning unquote.
He says that in British English both words are now commonly pronounced the same way, typically for tea.
Dictionarycom says most Americans now say they're strong in something by saying it is their forte, especially younger educated speakers, and speculates that they're confusing it with the musical term forte.
The American Heritage Dictionary backs this up with actual survey data.
In both their 1996 and 2016 usage panel surveys, 74 of respondents preferred the two-syllable pronunciation forte for the strong point meaning, even though some panel members argued for that pronunciation to be reserved for the music term.
Brian Garner in his influential Garner's Modern English Usage gives forte the two-syllable pronunciation.
His highest rating, stage 5 on the Language Change Index, meaning fully accepted.
He notes that the word quote has long been thought to be preferably pronounced with one syllable, like fort, because of its French origins, but acknowledges that most speakers of American English use the two-syllable version unquote, and that the two-syllable version can no longer be condemned.
Gardner does draw one line, though.
He considers the stress-shifted pronunciation forte, with emphasis on the second syllable, to be pretentious, and he says the same thing about spelling it with an acute accent over the E.
Now we can circle back to where we started.
Piano forte is actually Italian through and through.
According to Edamonline, it comes from the Italian phrase piano e forte, meaning soft and loud.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art says the poet and journalist Scipione Maffei first used the name gravichamballo col piano e forte in Harpsichord was soft and loud in 1711 when describing an instrument invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700.
Cristofori had created something revolutionary a keyboard instrument where you could vary the volume by changing how hard you pressed the keys.
The harpsichord couldn't do this.
Over time the long Italian name got shortened to pianoforte or fortepiano and eventually to just piano.
Because pianoforte is Italian, you might expect everyone to pronounce the forte part the Italian way, with two syllables.
And I get the sense that this is what musicians do.
But according to dictionaries, the French pronunciation is making a strong move for this fully Italian-derived word, and people are calling it a pianoforte.
It's the opposite of what's happening with the strong meaning, where the Italian pronunciation is overtaking the French.
No meaning is sticking to its pronunciation roots.
The bottom line is that F-O-R-T-E is really two words with the same spelling.
The French-derived one, meaning your strong point was traditionally pronounced like fort, but most Americans now say forte.
And the Italian musical term has always been two syllables, and dictionaries accept all of these pronunciations as standard.
For pianoforte, you can pronounce the ending as fort or forte or even fortee the British way.
When I said pianoforte on the show, I was using the first pronunciation listed in two American dictionaries.
But if you've always said pianoforte, that's strongly connected to its origin and musicians will approve.
Merriam-Webster puts it best no matter which pronunciation you choose, quote they are all considered standard and do not affect the meaning of the word unquote.
Sometimes language just gives us options, and this is one of those cases.
Linguistic flexibility has always been one of English's strong points.
It's forte, you might say, however you want to pronounce it.
Next, multiple people highlighted a dozens phrase that I missed in the same episode two weeks ago.
Here's one caller.
Hi, I was wondering after your episode the other day and when you were talking about dozens and it got me to thinking, I thought maybe you might mention in black vernacular the dozens when you know insulting people.
I just thought I would mention that.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I had never heard of the dozens before, but I have seen competitions with your mama jokes which I'm told is a similar thing.
So playing the dozens is an African-American ritualized insult game.
For example, Encyclopedia Britannica says that when playing the dozens, two people trade increasingly inventive insults, usually in front of an audience that reacts and encourages escalation.
Many variations focus on insults about a relative, often someone's mother, and some versions use rhymed couplets.
The game goes by many names, including sounding, capping, joning, snapping, ranking, and busting.
The name The Dozens feels especially unconnected to what's going on, though, and is hard to trace.
The first academic report came in 1939 from Yale psychologist John Dollard, and he admitted he didn't know where the name originated, although he suggested it might come from a 12-part rhyme that was popular at the time.
According to Edam Online, the first written evidence of people using the dozens in this way appeared in 1928, and researchers have been debating the origin ever since.
One widely repeated modern account says that enslaved people considered damaged or less valuable were grouped into lots of 12 and sold cheaply by the dozen.
A 1990 piece by Mona Lisa Saloy called African American Oral Traditions in Louisiana says quote But the Oxford English Dictionary lists six other theories, saying the most likely is that it comes from an early version of the game, in which quote unquote
The other theories are that the name comes from the word bulldoze, which in the 1870s meant a severe beating, since the game was about verbally thrashing your opponent.
Or that the name comes from an Old Scots verb, to dozen, meaning to stun or stupefy, relating to daze D-A-Z-E, speculating that this sense fits the player's goal of rattling their opponents with their wit.
Or that it comes from the phrase dirty dozen, which was used as the name for an earlier version of the game, where the insults were especially raunchy.
Or it's a reference to how many sexual partners a player would accuse the opponent's mother of having.
Or it comes from two sixes being a bad throw in the game craps.
So, as you can tell, there's been a lot of speculation and disagreement about the origin, but what researchers do seem more confident about is that the practice has roots in West Africa.
Amuzi Chimizi, writing in the Journal of Black Studies in 1976, connects the dozens to a Nigerian game called Ikocha and Kocha, meaning literally making disparaging remarks, and similar traditions appear in Ghana.
In America.
The tradition may have had other uses too, such as being a way to practice keeping your cool while someone insulted your family.
For people living in a society where losing your temper could be dangerous,
So thanks to the people who told me about The Dozens.
It's a traditional African-American verbal game, probably rooted in West African traditions and adapted over many years.
The name might come from slave auctions, from the number of insults people trade, or from somewhere else.
People don't seem to know for sure.
But the practice rests on a long tradition of verbal dexterity in Black culture and persists in comedy roasts, rap battles in schoolyards where kids trade yo mama jokes, probably without even knowing they're participating in something with such a long history.
Finally, I have a familect story from Bill.
We used to babysit for the child of a friend, and when that child was just learning how to talk, she had some peculiar ways of pronouncing things that we took on ourselves.
For example, when driving in the car and we wanted to turn on the air conditioner, she would say put the disher.
And so after that point, my partner and I would say that whenever we wanted to turn on the air conditioner,
And another one was the way she pronounced the word orange as Ornish.
And that was another thing that we took on and pronounced orange as Ornish.
So would you peel me an Ornish, for example?
Thanks, Bill.
People love familects.
I recently talked about them on WOSU in Ohio, and we got lots of calls.
So if you want to share your story, look for instructions in the show notes.
Finally, thanks to all our Grammarpalusians, old and new, over on Patreon.
Your support is a huge help and I love making all the little crossword puzzles and extra tips you get each week.
If you want to join us, visit patreon.com slash grammar girl.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Welcome to our new podcast associate Maram El-Nagib, and thanks to Rebecca Sebastian, Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Holly Hutchings and audio producer Dan Feyerabend, who went to both a thrash metal and a classical music concert on his recent vacation to Portland Oregon.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
