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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
A number of us (e.g. Chandra here , or “woe to go/go to woe” here ) have alluded to interchanges of woe and whoa, but I didn’t find a clear discussion of the use of woe for whoa. The first example here was published, written by a self-confessed former “screaming rock ‘n roll disc jockey” (now an editor, of all things), who used it twice in the same reminiscence.
I still remember the moment when one of those fourth-graders said to me, “We listen to you
every morning on the school bus.” ¶ Woe. My mind began to rewind some of those “clever” ad-libs that may have included a bit of sexual innuendo that followed some of those Madonna songs. ¶ […] ¶ my wife and I talked it over with our pastor. He responded with a simple question, “Feel like you’re sending more people to hell than to heaven?” Woe again.
I sort of wonder if he did it on purpose, or if it really is the only way he does it, and plan to find out. (I know the man.)
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Other examples (from the Internet):
That’s when we need to be able to hear that voice saying, woe. Just a minute. You forgot about something critical
“Woe, just a minute,” interrupted the old man, suddenly finding himself feeling very old and completely detached from all this modern teen talk.
Woe, what’s going on?
Woe, what are you looking for when you check plants?
As we all know, some people often naively ask, Oh woe, what’s the point of life?
Generally when we think we, or a process, ought to be stopped in its or our tracks, it’s because we see coming up something we think deplorable, wrong or even dangerous, something likely to result in woe. So both meanings fit reasonably well. Both “whoa” and “woe” (woe is me, 3 woes of the Apocalypse) are used as quasi-interjections. I don’t think I know anybody who pronounces the “wh” in whoa, so the sounds are identical, with only orthography to clue you in. In a case like the last one, I think I could use either pretty easily.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-05-20 19:05:50)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I don’t think I know anybody who pronounces the “wh” in whoa, so the sounds are identical, with only orthography to clue you in.
Easy for you to say. Somehow, until now, I’ve assumed woe/whoa would rhyme with no/Noah or low/lower. Admittedly that first stretched syllable in my hearing of whoa eclipsed the tiny tail of terminal vowel. It was barely detectable. Turns out it wasn’t detectable at all. Had I ever possessed a horse or a sled with a team of huskies I wouldn’t find myself in this embarrassing predicament.
As for the eggcornicity of woe/whoa, you have me convinced.
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I agree: some do pronounce a reduced final -a syllable; I even hear myself doing it at times. But often it is so reduced as to be practically indiscernible, or at least discountable as a mere offglide from a final w, a “tiny tail of terminal vowel” as you call it. And often I do not think I, or others around me, pronounce it at all. I don’t think we ever pronounce it strongly enough to rhyme with Noah (and certainly not rhotacized to rhyme with lower).
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-06-09 10:45:32)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I finally got a chance to talk to Bob, the author of the article I mentioned in the first post. He says he just wrote what he thought, and although he never thought of spelling it whoa he probably had in mind both the meanings “hold on here a minute” and “this is bad”, i.e. a meaning of whoa mixed with a meaning of woe . He understood immediately what I was asking about, but said he does not, or at least did not, separate the two ideas in his mind, or have active in his mind either the image of stopping an animal or of proclaiming “Woe” to anyone in particular. He also mentioned that the editor of the magazine and the president of the small university that published it both read the article and did not flag the usages as anything noteworthy, much less wrong.
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To me this is deeply intriguing. We (or at least I) tend to see A and B (“Whoa” and “Woe”) as separate, and to be very conscious of substituting one for the other. But it is perfectly reasonable to have a unified meaning, something like “(I suddenly am realizing that) This is bad and I want it to stop”, and identify it with the sound [‘woow], spell it how you like. I think Bob said he could have read it spelled either way and thought much the same about its meaning.
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The passageways between one and two are fascinating.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-06-01 13:29:12)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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