Eggcorn Forum

Here are some niche market varieties to go with the commerce pears.

Still life with decapitated fruit
39 of 44 “OFF WITH HIS HEAD”
Well the title might be a bit over-dramatic but I had to think of something other than “Pear.” Pears, especially Bosch and Angelou, are really great ‘painting’ pears because of the fantastic contrast between the whites of the pulp and the colors of the skins.

Mega Essay, Toni Morrison book
Before passing the threshold of Eva Peace’s labyrinthine house, one might take notice of “the four sickle-pear trees in the front yard”

Acorns: Bosc, Anjou, Seckel

I had always put the stress on the second syllable of “comice” and given the vowel in the first syllable a long sound, i.e. /koʊ’miːs/ rhymes with “fleece” and sounds nothing like “commerce”.

That was my first reaction, too. It turns out the difference is a British/American one. The OED gives /’kÉ’mɪs/ as its first pronunciation, but Dictionary.com (based on the (American) Random House Dictionary) gives “kuh-MEES” (/kÉ™’mis/) as the pronunciation. That’s the pronunciation I use, but like Tyler I’m not conscious of having heard the name spoken much, if at all.

“Comice” is the French word for an agricultural cooperative. It appears to have been strongly anglicized in Britain, while we Yanks hold onto to a more French-like pronunciation. I think that’s a not uncommon pattern.

I’ve often wondered about the psychology of anglicization with regard to uncommon or recently borrowed foreign terms. British English seems bravely to anglicize French terms with more frequency than American English does. Is that because the British are more familiar with French—being right there across the channel—and therefore feel more comfortable accommodating French terms to their own linguistic patterns? Or could it reflect a continuing if subdued cultural antagonism between the two former enemies? Or something else?

But there’s probably not one pattern for anglicization. In the US, regional differences in the anglicization of Spanish borrowings are pretty clear, and people who have less familiarity with Spanish are the ones more likely to anglicize. For instance, a number of people have told me that many folks in Minnesota and Wisconsin (i.e., near the Canadian border) pronounce “taco” “tay-koh.” That’s shudder-inducing to a Westerner like me, for whom it’s “tah-koh.”

I was also told that the tacos you get in Madison, Wisconsin taste like they were made by someone who rhymes the name with “fake-o.” But that was in the 90s—maybe Mexican cuisine in Madison has undergone a rebirth.