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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
There must be very good reason why so many of our words involving warfare are drawn from the French. Barrage is a good example, and it could easily be mistaken for a heavily rhotic barge, transporting us neatly to an eggcornishness which works whether read as a carrier of freight or aggressively loutish behaviour
Having been accustomed to the constant barge of information characteristic of the twenty-first century, this world often felt too slow.
It stimulates the feeling of isolation, comparison, and constant barge of negative news in the media.
Learn how to succeed despite the constant barge of noise and distraction in our lives and business.
Despite the constant barge of attacks, the Blacks defence held their ground well with well-timed offside traps that worked to perfection.
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I love it. It makes sense, which of course a good eggcorn must.
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Less meaningful perhaps, but still interesting, is the following:
He said she had totally ignored him, then when I returned home I was met with a barrige of wails and complaints which lasted all day
At that very momment he heard footsteps , all of a sudden a barrige of bullets and kunai knifes hit the door behind him
[the] president has excoriated him in a barrige of tweets calling him everything from beleaguered to disgraceful and even missing in action
My guess is that this is, at least in part, a spelling pronunciation; the perps have read “barrage” but more rarely heard it, or at least have not linked what they have read to what they have heard, and have pronounced it in their minds and/or speech as “BEAR-age” rather than “ba-RAHJ”. “Barrige” is a reasonable spelling for that mispronunciation.
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If I think of a barge bearing down on me, I might construe that as a kind of bear-age, and so for that pronunciation there might be a bit of eggcornishness in it after all? As so often, I end up wondering what is going on in perps’ minds. In any case, that spelling does occur:
And if next week you feel a bearage of the bills, if next month, a friend texts you that his divorce is imminent or that her cancer has […]
They might also be pronouncing BAR-age, and with that pronunciation you might construe a multiple, spread-out defensive attack that bars your way forward. Barage is a possible way to spell that, though barrage strikes me as a bit more likely. Anyway:
They can lay down a barage of BBs with the right battery.
they began to lay down a barage of bricks and stones against the squad of officers
Also attested:
Yel in recent weeks there has been a Barridge of letters to Kelowna s newspaper the daily courier bewailing bilingualism and the lost rights …
A barridge of “well you did this this or that!” At the most gentle, an agressive Facebook post about how much she hates herself (que the sympathy( votes).
(Queue, of course. If you can think of the misspelling, or even if you can’t, you can probably find it.)
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Documenting (ironic word in the context) the mispronunciation at least (I think):
Episode Ten – Teotihuacan and Changes – No Pun Included
https://www.nopunincluded.com › podcastarchives › ep…
Jun 3, 2020 — I enjoyed the podcast, it was just when I heard the constant “barridge” it felt like I was missing something. Michael Helps • 2 years ago.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-07-26 08:46:00)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Interesting observations, David, and I tried to recall them yesterday as I staked a clump of borage which a high wind had brought low. Failed of course. Instead I wondered how it came about that certain French words are pronounced in a reasonably French manner and others are not.
Apart from a handful of words like fuselage, sabotage, entourage and mirage, other -age suffixed words seem determinedly anglicised, except perhaps for garage pronunciation which seems to hover about uncomfortably, depending on locality and/or social class. “GA-ridge” seems the most common, followed by “GA-rahj” with “g’-RAHJ” representing the refined 2%.Suddenly it strikes me, since what I call a herb is called an urrb in US speech, you may not rhyme borage with porridge, but I don’t suppose it matters much.
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I don’t think I’ve ever heard of borage, under either pronunciation. The blossom looks a lot like a five-petaled spiderwort, spiderwort being one of my favorite flowers (for its insouciant personality as much as its beauty).
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Is g’RAHJ associated with the “refined 2%” in GB only? I’ve always used it. My folks were eddicated, but not particularly snobbish about things. I think most folk here in the US say it that way, though we may upgrade that apostrophe into a schwa, in anything approaching deliberate speech.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2022-08-01 19:11:54)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Is g’RAHJ associated with the “refined 2%” in GB only?
I imagine so, though on reflection Received Pronunciation may stress the first syllable instead. I wouldn’t expect this to apply elsewhere of course.
I’m sorry you don’t have borage, but spiderwort is bonny enough and edible too. Spiderwort. Is the wort wought or wirt? Wart or wert? What is it with w-words? Words like wort and worm and word (!) ought to rhyme with fort, form and ford. (In my dialect many of them do!)
To reflect its pronunciation word could have been spelled werd, wird or wurd but instead someone chose ‘o’, thereby displacing ward and forcing a visual rhyme with bard and lard instead of bored and lord. It’s as if there had been some mediaeval convention of crazed lexicographers celebrating the end of their labours – no x-rays, yachts or zebras in those days – and all that mead and metheglin scrambled their senses. Perhaps it took place at Woolfardisworthy (pronounced Woolsery) where whitches exhaled upon certain whords causing them to be preceded by a little sigh.
Many spellings were once phonetic and are left stranded when pronunciation moves on, but it does seem that monosyllabic w-words have suffered disproportionately. And we haven’t really explored why walking to work isn’t working to werk, or the safest way to wash a wasp.
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