Grammar Girl here.
I'm Mignon Fogarty.
Last week, I looked up how to pronounce Iran for the piece on toponyms, along with 15 other words.
That piece was a pronunciation beast.
So I am pleased to have the first piece today by Valerie Friedland on why people pronounce Iran in different ways.
It's actually a joke in my family that if there's a vowel in a name, I am sure to pick the wrong way to say it.
There's a grocery store in Arizona called Basha's.
That I called Basha's and apparently last week I still even pronounced Genoa wrong, so sorry.
And then after that segment, we'll talk about words for smells.
This next piece is by Valerie.
With the war in Iran on everyone's lips, you might have noticed an inconsistency in the way that nation's name is said, varying between a more native-like Iran pronunciation and a more Americanized Iran one.
An everyday listener might just chalk this up to being the result of regional differences or the version we learned growing up, like the alternate ways Americans have of referring to information as data or data, and the thing on top of our house as a roof or a roof.
But as a linguist who studies what our accents reveal about our histories and social identities, I know that the way we pronounce things often gives off clues about who we are and what we believe in.
And that appears to be the case with these two distinct pronunciations.
It's probably not a big surprise to learn that listeners often hear certain words or accents as indicating someone's political inclinations.
That's because people are primed to notice patterns that mark group membership, be it a style of clothes or pronouncing fire more like far.
Once they notice these patterns, people then tend to assign whatever traits are believed to characterize that group to the sounds of their speech.
For instance, in 2018, researchers examined how people perceived potential political candidates with a Southern versus non-Southern American accent, and found that listeners perceived Southern-sounding politicians as more likely to be conservative and to hold right-leaning views on issues such as gun rights and abortion.
All that from hearing someone pronounce pin like pen or saying buh-bye for bye.
This suggests that even a small difference in the way a vowel is pronounced can suggest a lot more about political ideology than you might imagine, even if that suggestion isn't always accurate.
Going back to the question of what drives variation in the pronunciation of Iran, a linguistic study examining politics and pronunciation during the Iraq War offers some insight.
In analyzing 2007 House of Representative debates about sending more US troops to Iraq, linguists found that a Congress member's political party affiliation was the strongest predictor of how the A vowel in Iraq was pronounced.
Republicans preferred the anglicized short, A pronunciation closer to Iraq, while Democrats preferred a more A-like one.
As in Iraq,
The authors suggest that the Democratic preference approximating a more native pronunciation was motivated by greater multicultural sensitivity.
On the other hand, even though people can also pronounce the I vowel in a more anglicized way, as in Iraq and Iraq, the difference between those pronunciations in Iraq and Iraq didn't significantly correlate with partisanship.
Two later studies, in 2011 and 2018, of everyday speakers who were asked to pronounce Iraq in non-political contexts discovered no significant difference by political affiliation.
The biggest predictor favoring an Iraq pronunciation was that a person spoke multiple languages, as the AH vowel sound is more frequent in second languages commonly spoke in the US, such as Spanish, French and Italian.
However, despite the fact that vowel choice doesn't actually align with the political leanings of everyday speakers, when people in the 2018 study were explicitly asked about how saying Iraq or Iraq Tied into political views, they did say the ah pronunciation was linked with liberalism, and the association was particularly strong for people who used the ah pronunciation and were liberal themselves.
This suggests that people might have picked up on this pattern from hearing politicians.
They were aware of the fact that this vowel variation had become, in relevant contexts, symbolic of liberal versus conservative stances.
In looking more generally at the pronunciation of borrowed words written with the letter A, like that of pasta or tobacco, linguist Charles Boberg suggested that Americans generally follow two possible paths either pronouncing it with the short A like in bat, or with the A like in father.
Beaubourg suggests that people's attitudes play a role.
Since many Americans associate the ah pronunciation with more education and sophistication, given its connection to upper-crust British use in words like bath or aunt.
There's been an increasing tendency for Americans to use the ah in words borrowed since World War II, as with origami or nacho.
But in looking at variability in the pronunciation of Iraq, other linguists hypothesize that the AH vowel is only heard as more sophisticated when a source language is held in high esteem, as with the British-derived AH in ONT, or when those speaking foreign languages are well-regarded.
In contrast, when there's less respect for a people or a place, the choice of an Americanized vowel rather than the more accurate native one might be preferred.
This difference in attitudes may well explain much of the variation in politicians' pronunciation of Iraq and possibly Iran.
Not surprisingly, in their study of how members of Congress pronounced Iraq, these researchers found that, beyond party affiliation, a politician's war stance for or against sending additional troops was a significant determinant of which vowel was used.
If they used the Iraq pronunciation, they were more likely to favor sending more troops to the country.
When politics around an issue fades, pronunciation differences can fade as well.
For example, a similar linguistic contrast existed during the Vietnam War, when Vietnam was commonly pronounced as having the same short A sound as in bat, including from the lips of President Lyndon B Johnson.
Now, years later, the Vietnam pronunciation dominates and the Nam version is virtually absent in those born in more recent times.
In the end, vowels and accents have always told a fascinating story about our politics, and we can hope for a future with peace.
And maybe a shared pronunciation will follow.
That segment was written by Valerie Friedland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of the soon to be released book Why We Talk Funny The Real Story Behind Our Accents.
A version of this piece originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license.
And you can find Valerie at Valerie Friedland dot com.
Next, let's talk about some confusing words we can use when things stink.
Odorous, malodorous and odoriferous are all ways of describing a smell and ultimately they all go back to the same Latin root that meant a smell or a scent.
Odorous was originally a nice smell.
Samuel Johnson's famous Dictionary of the English Language from 1818 defines it only positively—fragrant perfumed, sweet of scent.
One example he included is from Edmund Spencer's Sonnet 64, which compares the scent of a woman to various flowers.
Such fragrant flowers do give most odorous smell.
But, as you know, the meaning of words can change and today, something that's odorous can have a good smell or bad smell, and people seem to use it most often for the icky ones.
Here's an example from the Robin Page mystery Death at Rottingdean.
So he took the coin, pocketed his reservations and hurried off to the White Horse where the coffin, as the odorous old coach was known, was about to begin its afternoon run to Brighton.
Of the 98 examples of the word odorous in the corpus of contemporary American English, 77 describe something unpleasant like rotting waste and odorous green gunk.
Odorous also often appears in scientific writing to simply describe something that has a scent.
Here's an example from a physiological psychology textbook.
Very odorous compounds may require less solubility because relatively few molecules need to reach the receptors.
That kind of neutral scientific or technical use accounts for about 10 of the examples on the coca site.
Moving on to malodorous, the mal- prefix in malodorous means bad, just as it does in malformed, maltreated and maladjusted.
Some less obvious words that use the mal- prefix to mean bad include malaise, which means bad ease malady, which roughly means badness that is had or received malaria, which means bad air, and malevolent, which means bad wishing.
So by now, you've probably guessed that malodorous is reserved for bad smells.
In general, I'd say malodorous smells are worse than odorous smells.
For example, you could say, the malodorous entrails made Squiggly gag.
Poor Squiggly.
Next, the least common of these three words to describe smells is odoriferous.
According to a Google Books search, it was actually the most common of the three words in 1800, but it's been declining ever since.
Like odorous odoriferous originally described a pleasant smell, can now describe good or bad smells and is most often used for bad smells.
Although Garner's Modern English usage continues to say odoriferous should be reserved for good smells, a COCA search shows that the dominant meaning in actual use is negative, at least in that database.
Interestingly odoriferous comes from the same Latin odor root combined with the word for to bear or to carry.
So it means to bear or carry a scent.
And now we have to talk about a word that some people mistakenly use for smells, odious.
It sounds a lot like odorous, but odious comes from a Latin word that meant hatred.
And you use it as an adjective to describe something that's offensive, repulsive or deserving of hate.
And I immediately thought of odious when I was studying Spanish and learned that the verb meaning hate is odiar.
But because English speakers are confused about this word, sentences like the following create problems.
Squiggly found cleaning fish to be an odious task.
You can find something smelly to be offensive, repulsive, or deserving of hate.
So does Squiggly dislike cleaning fish because it grosses him out in general?
Or does he just think it's smelly?
It could be both an odorous and odious task.
My advice is to be careful when using odious, although it wouldn't be wrong to use it in a sentence where it could mean the task was repulsive because it was smelly.
If you want to focus on the task being hateful instead of smelly, you can find better words.
To me, something like reading online comments can be an odious task, is clear, but Squiggly found cleaning fish to be an odious task risks confusing some readers, who might confuse odious with odorous because of the context and the similar sound.
Finally, another word for smells that often confuses people is noisome.
It sounds like noisy, but that's not what it means.
A noisome problem offends your nose, not your ears.
It comes from the same root as the word annoy and can also describe something that's more broadly offensive or disgusting.
But in practice, it's almost always used to describe smells.
Think of something noisome as something that annoys your nose.
Here's an example from an 1874 book called Tiny Travelers.
There's a good deal of mud deposited at the bottom of the canals which, when disturbed by barges, produces a most noisome effluvium.
And it's no coincidence that the example is from the 1800s, because noisome is falling out of favor.
A Google engram search shows that it was used much more often in the early 1800s than it is today.
Although it took a small uptick around the year 2000, and I'm not sure what's up with that.
But to sum up, odorous, malodorous, odoriferous, and noisome all describe things that smell.
If you want to describe a bad smell, malodorous is probably the safest choice.
Remember that the mal- prefix means bad.
Odorous can have a more neutral meaning, and people are just generally confused about what noisome means.
Also, these all sound like 10 words to me, so consider whether something simpler, like smelly or fragrant, might be a better choice.
Finally, odious doesn't specifically mean smelly at all.
You could use it to describe something smelly if it were offensive or repulsive, but think twice before using it to describe something offensive that isn't smelly, because people confuse it with odorous.
And no matter which word you use I hope you don't have many occasions this week to describe things that are either malodorous or odious.
Finally, I have a familect story from Steve.
Hi, Mignon.
My name is Steve Chernikoff, and I'm calling with a familect.
My aunt who unfortunately just recently passed away— had a preternatural ability to find spots as close as possible to where she needed to be the spot by the front door of the mall, or close to the gate at the stadium, et cetera.
So in my family, we call those Anjan spots because of her ability to find them so easily.
Thank you.
I love the podcast and I look forward to hearing this again.
Thanks so much, Steve.
Familects are a great way to keep the memories of our loved ones alive.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast.
Thanks to Morgan Christensen, Rebecca Sebastian, Holly Hutchings, Dan Firerobin, Stephen Schepanski, Nat Hoops and Maram El-Nagib, whose first name is a palindrome.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all.
Thanks for listening.
