Chemgal: Do people pronounce “werewolf” to rhyme with the other three, or more like “where-wolf”? I’d swear the second, but this comic seems to assume the first.
- Comment
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Comics I Don't Understand 
To me, “where-wolf” rhymes with the other 3.
Could it be because he’s a Canadian who spells “favorite” with an “ou?” Do they pronounce it differently there? I have to admit that the word werewolf has never come up in my exchanges with Canadians in the past.
I definitely pronounce it more like “wear-wolf” than “weir-wolf”.
So already our alternate, “correct” pronunciation comic has three frame: were-wolf, where-wolf, wear-wolf…
Now we just need one more and then some doodles…
I’m also in the ‘wear’ group.
Lexico.com is my current go-to for standard spellings and pronunciations, but the results are problematic this time.
The UK entry at https://www.lexico.com/definition/werewolf gives several options — /ˈwɛːwʊlf/ /ˈwɪəːwʊlf/ /ˈwəːwʊlf/ – with different first vowels, but none like the word ‘were’ — but the problem (as the audio clip will make clear) is that they are coming from an r-less dialect.
The US entry, at https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/werewolf , gives just one pronunciation – but it looks like two because they give it in two notations — /ˈwerˌwo͝olf/ /ˈwɛrˌwʊlf/ . The first vowel is the one in ‘wear’. But if you play the audio clip, though that seems to be the vowel, I distrust the clip because they got a speaker who elides the l in the ‘wolf’ part and says woof.
I can’t find it online again, but there’s a 4-panel comic illustrating “a werewolf”, “a wearwolf”, “a warewolf”, and “aware wolf”. And that’s how I pronounce it, too.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned Young Frankenstein’s “Werewolf!” “There wolf. There castle” scene yet.
>”To me, “where-wolf” rhymes with the other 3.”
Um… what?
You drink bear and at christmas you wish people chair? I don’t understand your comment.
Susan beat me to what Iw as going to say, but I’ll add that I have heard both the “we’re” and “ware” pronunciations.
Susan beat ME to it also?
There’s an amusing poem by Christian Morgenstern called “Der Werwolf”, which plays on the fact that the interrogative pronoun “Wer?” (meaning “who?”) takes on different forms depending on the grammatical case of the person involved. The German “Werwolf“ asks to be “conjugated” (or “declined”), and is thus transformed in turn into a “Wenwolf“ (whom), “Wemwolf“ (to whom), and “Weswolf“ (whose). He then asks to be transformed into a plural, but is disappointed to discover that even though he has a wife and kids, there is no plural form for the term “who?”.
Growing up, I tended to use the form that works in this comic. After 21 years living in Germany, I incline more to the “where-wolf” pronunciation. The long e makes a certain amount of sense, since the were- prefix is cognate with the Latin “vir” and the proto-Indo-European root is *wi-ro. Thinking about, although I’m inclined to say “where-wolf”, I would say “weer-geld” even though it’s the same prefix.
So we’re more-or-less all agreed that “werewolf” is pronounced like the word “wear”, right?
So I’m confused by Pinny’s comment. Does Pinny pronounce “cheer” like “chair”? Or is there some sort of dialectical merger going on (like cot-caught, only chair-cheer)?
Powers, I think perhaps you were just a little too quick to go from “more-or-less all agreed” to a full “all”. Pinny’s comment reads to me like a disagreement with that majority. (Well. pre-disagreement..) They say “weer-“wolf and it simply does rhyme with ‘cheer’ , ‘beer’ , and ‘sphere’, in their usual pronunciations.
That syllable (or its ending anyway) is also part of a pronunciation hobbyhorse I’ve been tracking for a couple years. It’s in the word “experiment”, the second syllable. I’ve noticed a number of people — mostly younger and mostly American, but not 100% on either count — give it a sound that is just like the way they (and I) say the first two syllables of “experience”.
So, something like ex-spear-i-ment.
DemetriosX — if we are going for pronunciation from etymology, “werewolf” comes from the Old English, in which the vowel in “wer” is similar to the one in “bet”.
Wait. What?
I’m in the U.S. Is it not universally (or nationally, anyway) pronounced ex-spear-i-ment?
How else do others pronounce it?
Are we talking “peer” vs “pare”? I’ve heard both. In the song “Experiment” in De-Lovely, it definitely sounds like pare to me.
Whirr-wilf.
Yes, I heard or started noticing the “peer” pronunciation maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and egan obsessing over how to explain it clearly, and figuring out who says it which way, maybe a year ago.
In fairness, I can see how someone would want to make “experiment” sound like “experience” — but it still does sound a little weird to me.
Why do I say it’s hard to describe? Because “pair” or “pare” is not absolutely the same vowel as I use in “experiment” — but close enough for “Do you say it (A) or (B)?” . I want to say my ‘er’ in ‘experiment’ is like in “To err is human” but dang it there is widespread disagreement over how to say that one! So let me point instead to “errand” or a knight-“errant” or the name “Perry”. Or best, the noun “periscope” as the whole stretch ‘peri’ matches.
1958Fury, thanks but I couldn’t get anything much from your video.
My bad, my sound settings were wrong!
Thanks for that clip. It does illlustrate nicely the pronunciation I long thought was the only one, with maybe a little regional or manner variation.
I think I’ve used the “peer” pronunciation my entire life, but my wife uses “pare”. If it helps, I’m from the South and she’s from the North.
“I’m in the U.S. Is it not universally (or nationally, anyway) pronounced ex-spear-i-ment?”
Are you making a joke? I don’t get it.
“Ex-spare-ment” is how Americans pronounce it. It’s universal.
……
Kilby…. My high school german teacher told me that story. I thought it was funny and told it to my mother. She asked if the punchline was “So when someone said ‘Hey, Wolfy, do you want to come to dinner’ did he say ‘I decline’?” My little sister overheard that and in her infuriating way thought it was hilarious a repeated it to all her friends. But she missed the point that he was a werewolf and the story was in German. So she told the joke “There was a fox that decided he wanted to be a pronoun and have declensions; and a friend said ‘Hey, foxy, do you want to have dinner’ and he said ‘I decline'”. She *insisted* her friends thought it was funny despite all of them actually responding with a puzzled “huh” and I …. well, I pounded my head against a wall.
This was the dynamics of my teenage years.
For me, the 2nd vowel in experiment is the same vowel as in pet.
Just checked. Warren Zevon uses “where”. Webster’s online gives “where” as the primary pronunciation, but also allows “weer” and “wurr” with a schwa, which I’ve never heard anyone say.
After giving it some more thought, I’m pretty sure my current use of “where” comes from living in Germany. As an old gamer, I’ve run across all sorts of were creatures, from rats to tigers, and I would instinctively pronounce all of them with a long e.
In high school we had a very poor Physics teacher, the class was just awful, and we were young and naive enough to not really expect or even believe that such a poor teacher could exist. We tried in vain to do our best, and were constantly shot down. (“Stop editorializing in your lab reports!” ??? We were diligently outlining all the design flaws in the “experiment” we had been made to do — experiment in quotes because there really was no independent variable being tested, we were just doing a bunch of pointless measurements and then being given a formula and a physical constant to derive some answer — I recall “measuring” the specific gravity of water using the specific gravity of water as a constant, and something with forces in a triangle, where basically we were just doing geometry, no actual physics needed, and the “experiment” wasn’t even designed so as to measure and test the geometry, it just assumed geometry and had us fill in numbers — that kind of thing; we were diligently reporting the flaws in the experimental design, as we had been taught to do by our previous-year’s fantastic biology teacher.) I gave up in despondency for most of third marking period, and then, faced with a failing grade for not doing any of the work, just did the poorest, bare minimum, fill in the blank rote work in a catch-up rush during 4th marking period, and was praised that I “finally” “got it”, these were my “best” lab reports yet! (I had discovered the impossibly ambiguous fill-in-the-blank workbook work could be solved by finding the corresponding page in the text book which had the identical sentences, only without blanks — I had been trying to fill in the answers by deriving the work, frustratingly so, because it was so often impossible to reach one unambiguous answer; I wrote the “lab reports” by filling in a template, not even using complete sentences, only filling in material prompted by the text book questions, mostly answerable by filling in from previous paragraphs from the text book — work that anywhere else would count as plagiarism! I did it sarcastically, being as I had no other clue what the hell to do for this hell of a class (which I had been desperately looking forward to for two years!), and was floored when I received praise for this!
ANYway, the reason I bring this up is because interestingly the “teacher” had a really weird way (to us) of saying “experiment”, and as we starting drowning in the mire of her “experiments”, we started referring to them as “exPAHRiments”, to distinguish them from anything to do with the real world. We meant it more and more disparagingly as time went on, until we stopped caring altogether. The “teacher” was Vacuumhead, because airhead would imply too much brain-matter.
@cloonbounty, I’m also Canadian, so that’s not the issue. Unless it’s even more regional, as Doug Savage is located on the west coast, and I’m a prairie gal.
In all the parts of the south I’ve been in, VA to FL to TX, the natives always said weer-wolf and ex-peer-iment. Anyone who said it “wear” and “pare” was “puttin’ on airs”.
If we are going to discuss how to pronounce “experiment”, let’s go discuss it in the … LABratory or laBORatory? Which?
(Side note: In English class, when one student gave his book report on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the teacher caught on that he had watched the movie on TV instead of reading the book when he mentioned the laBORatory.)
(Oh, don’t forget to take your vittamins and wrap that sandwich in aluminium foil.)
My parents were from Arkansas, but I spent my first eight years on the East coast (Delaware, not exactly North, but not Southern, either.) The next eight years were spent bouncing around the Mid-south, so whatever accent I have is pretty eclectic. I will use both were-wolf and wear-wolf, sometimes in the same conversation, but it has always been ex-spear-a-ment. In the Kevin Kline ditty it’s obvious the lyricist meant it to rhyme with merriment, but it’s not uncommon to force a rhyme for the novelty effect, so who’s to say?
The “sphere wolf” there gets a double-take from me every time I scroll past it. It just looks so similar to the Firefox browser icon on my panel.
@ larK – “…drowning in the mire of her “experiments”…”
Reading through your tale of misery, it wasn’t until I discovered the pronoun “her” near the end that I was sure that your incompetent physics teacher was not the same as the one I had in high school. His inability was well-known, and for that reason I delayed taking physics until my senior year (in the vain hope that he would retire first). Only after I had suffered through his class did he decide to retire before the following year. Nuts.
I had never heard of anyone using “ex-SPEAR-i-ment” or “WEER-wolf” until now, and, had I heard it, I would have assumed they were being silly for effect, or making fun of someone. I wouldn’t even be able to guess what kind of accent they were making fun of. “Werebear” rhymes with itself; “experiment” rhymes with “there ‘e went” or “merriment”. I’ve never heard anything else.
Kilby: I’m glad that your poor teacher didn’t preclude you completing your physics degree (at least I’m assuming, based on what I’ve gather from your past postings here). Upon reflection, I seriously think that that terrible experience I had wasted so much of my precious young malleable brain time that by the time I got to college, I had not worked enough to train my visual-thinking brain to use equations natively, so that it was too much work “translating” how I saw things to the equations that become more and more necessary to do the complex stuff. Yeah, I could work equations, but it was never native enough for me that I wasn’t just speaking french by using a dictionary to translate every word in the sentence I’d composed in English, instead of just, you know, speaking French. When Feynman describes how he thinks when someone poses a problem to him, of balls that turn colors, grow hairs, whatever, to fit conditions, thus enabling him to see the problem, and intuitively know things about the problem set, that really resonated with me — that’s what I do; I don’t intuitively see any sense in equations, but can painfully translate what I see to the language of equations. But I don’t speak that language natively. Where Feynman at that age was re-deriving calculus from first principles with a friend, I was trying in vain to defend the basic scientific method to an idiot, and failing, and despairing, and was young and stupid enough that I floated rudderlessly for the greater part of that year, totally wasting my time. By the time I got to college, after two years of physics, it just got to be too much unjoyful grunt work painfully manipulating equations, unable to “talk” because I just couldn’t speak the language without a terrible accent, and unable to “think” in the language. I exploded out and took full advantage of being at a university, and took all kinds of other courses, in the end having enough credits (well, except for that upper level writing credit I talked about in another thread) for three different major-minor combinations, but I often do regret not getting the physics degree — it was a great department (top ten at the time) at a great school, full access to the professors, who were kind and helpful (I remember one of them going with me after class to a sink as we tried to hash out how it was that I understood the Coriolis effect, but was unable to manipulate the equations very well — and discovered empirically that it doesn’t actually hold for something as small as a sink draining anyway.) The waste, the waste!
(And for the record, I still don’t understand how someone as deeply lacking in understanding of the basic scientific method as ol’ vacuumhead was able to get a PhD in that subject from any school! (Yeah! She had a PhD!))
I really liked my physics teacher… my science teachers actually understood the point of “science” and stuff like that.
At one point, I turned in a lab report which had been on rolling a ball down a ramp and measuring how long it took, in order to calculate acceleration. My partner and I were REALLY bad at lab work, and got numbers that just plain didn’t make sense.
So we reported what we found, and graphed them, and turned in our conclusion that the speed of something was approximately equal to the cube of how long it had been accelerating. (Spoiler alert: it’s not. And we knew it wasn’t. We knew what the numbers were SUPPOSED to be.)
We got a C on the lab report, which the teacher explained as the average of an F for being really bad at experiments, and an A for actually reporting what we found and coming up with a conclusion that matched our really crappy data rather than fudging it. We thought this seemed eminently fair.
@ larK – That didn’t interfere with my degree at all, but that’s because I never considered physics as a major (too theoretical for my taste), and I certainly would not have felt equipped for it without a serious amount of additional preparation. I started out in chemistry (primarily because of a truly superb high school teacher, with whom I was lucky enough to take both regular and then another year of AP chemistry). I later switched to engineering, fearing that chemistry would probably lead to a career with some multinational conglomerate (like BASF or Monsanto). On the other hand, if I had stuck with chemistry for just one more year, I might have gotten a year of college German, instead of learning it piecemeal here.
An advantage to engineering is being able to get a job that’s in line with your education and you really don’t need further schooling (although it doesn’t hurt). With Physics especially, you really need a PhD to get anywhere. Chemistry BS will get you lab tech jobs and the like. Or you can go into teaching with those of course.
No, Woozy, it’s not universal. I’ve always known it as like “spearmint.”
LarK, you should be reading the mrfitz comic. He’s has quite a few strips about a teacher having “standards” forced upon him. One is at
http://www.mrfitz.com/strips.php?date=2020-01-22; go back before that for more.@ Boise Ed – How in the world did you get WordPress to post that URL in Courier? That could be really useful in other contexts, too.
Kilby: I enclosed it in angle-bracket() and then the same thing plus a slash. It’s what works on GoComics, and apparently here too.
@ Boise Ed – Does “…enclosed it” refer to the entire link, or just the word “Courier” as a tag?
P.S. This question is performing double duty as a test case.
P.P.S. Well, the test failed, so the correct syntax is still a mystery to me.
Ed: reading stuff like mrfitz just makes me glad I never had children. I would have had to end up home schooling them, and despite wish-fulfillment fantasies like the movie Captain Fantastic, I’m sure my kids would have resented the effort either way. (Actually, the kids in Captain Fantastic resented the father, didn’t they?) I actually plotted out a course: up to maybe 3rd grade they go go socialize in school, then for middle school, which is a waste academically, and a nightmare socially, they would be home-schooled, and then they would go back for high school, not for any academic reason, because they would have already learned everything in those very productive years that are so wasted in our middle schools, but for social learning. And after having read the book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34930861-achtung-baby"Achtung, Baby, I would definitely move back to Germany for the first years’ schooling…
So, as I said, I’m glad I don’t have kids and don’t have to daily be deeply, deeply angry about how bad our schooling is…
ianosmond, someone pointed out that the experiment of rolling balls down an inclined plane *should* give results that don’t match what you naively expect. Per “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”
“But a ball rolling down an inclined plane…” “has an inertia
to get it to turn, and will, *if you do the experiment*,
produce five sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra
energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball.”
Arthur, yes, the results won’t match what you would expect if you ignored rotational inertia. But why would you assume a physics lab wouldn’t expect you to understand rotational inertia?
WW, I could go into great detail, but I’ll shortcut it and say that I expect American schools to over-simplify almost anything they don’t outright get wrong.
Oh, and it’s not just American schools. In 2005, Victoria Australia schools thought it was too hard for students to use 9.8 m/s/s for the force of gravity, and it changed the year 12 physics exam to use 10 m/s/s.
Arthur, there’s nothing in the story to indicate that the school got it wrong, so if that’s all it takes for you to postulate that the school got it wrong, you’ve got some pretty strong confirmation bias at work.
Neglecting rotational inertia would give the wrong coefficient, not the wrong power law, so it’s not even consistent with ianosmond’s story.
From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
“Then I held up the elementary physics textbook they were using. “There are no experimental results mentioned anywhere in this book, except in one place where there is a ball, rolling down an inclined plane, in which it says how far the ball got after one second, two seconds, three seconds, and so on. The numbers have ‘errors’ in them – that is, if you look at them, you think you’re looking at experimental results, because the numbers are a little above, or a little below, the theoretical values. The book even talks about having to correct the experimental errors – very fine. The trouble is, when you calculate the value of the acceleration constant from these values, you get the right answer. But a ball rolling down an inclined plane, if it is actually done, has an inertia to get it to turn, and will, if you do the experiment, produce five-sevenths of the right answer, because of the extra energy needed to go into the rotation of the ball. Therefore this single example of experimental ‘results’ is obtained from a fake experiment. Nobody had rolled such a ball, or they would never have gotten those results!”
The only quibble is that the textbook he is referring to is a Brazilian textbook, and it’s a textbook, not a school, but otherwise everything in the story indicates that they “got it wrong” — very wrong!
I’ll add that what he is describing at length (beyond the quote above) about what he saw in the Brazilian teaching of Physics in the 1950s was exactly the same problem I encountered in the US in high school in the 1980s.
@ Arthur – I would have had an easier time comprehending the gravitational acceleration law if I had first encountered it in precise metric units: 9.8 m/s^2 is clearly an experimental result. Unfortunately, in the elementary school science book that I first had, it was presented as 32 feet/s^2; with the “squared” on one end, I figured that the integer power of two on the other end must be the result of some fundamental principle that they had not bothered to explain.
Kilby, that’s a good point. I never noticed the nice, round number and that it was a power of two. And, btw, it turns out it’s *not* a nice, round number, it’s actually 32.174049 feet/second/second, or, with the same accuracy as 9.8, 32.2 ft/s/s.
If we hadn’t had this conversation on CIDU, I might never have noticed that 32 wasn’t exact, though it should have been obviously likely.
In France, I’ve been taught 9.81m/s/s from the start.
and just to pile on the opinions for how to teach a formula, so that it is comprehended not just memorized, I think “per second per second” is actually far more cognitively sensible than “per second squared”, no matter how much the latter may seem more efficient, and strictly correct.
(*Eventually* the “squared” as a notation by superscript will match up to the notation for taking a second derivative — which is not quite what is happening here but relates)
@ Mitch4 – I would agree that the concatenation is definitely better for understanding what is physically happening, but once you get past that and start slicing and dicing constants (and their corresponding units) in equations, it is much easier to adjust and cancel things when there is only one denominator line.
P.S. I remember seeing an equation that had sequential exponents, which I cannot reproduce here, but effectively is was something like “X^Y^Z”. I was never able to determine which operation should be evaluated first. Should that mean “(X^Y)^Z”, or was is supposed to be “X^(Y^Z)”? Mathematicians (and physicists) have a tendency to reduce their theories to the briefest (prettiest) form, but a lot of important details get swept under the rug in the process.
And there may be in some contexts good practical reason for using together units of the same dimension but different sizes. If your car goes from zero to sixty in six seconds, that would be 10 mi/hr/sec, “miles per hour per second” — but it’s still acceleration and the abstract dimensions could still be called x/t^2. But it’s easier to see “metres per second per second” as entirely parallel to this, than for “metres per second squared”.
BTW, James Joyce had some fascination with the value of g in English units. It shows up in Ulysses with Bloom sometimes thinking “thirty two feet per second per second” as a kind of mantra. And in Finnegans Wake the numerical value 32 stands in for The Fall — while 11 (since it starts fresh on a new decade after 10 closes stuff out) is a rise or resurrection. So a combined 3211 or 1132 can in condensed shorthand stand in for the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall.
Speaking of “units of the same dimension but different sizes”, this was recently in the news: the U.S. uses two different definitions of “foot”, and they’re trying to ditch one of them:
All I know is that people can become peeved if they ask if you what’s wrong with saying “knots per hour” (designed to test if you know that knots is already a unit of speed) and you answer “absolutely nothing, it’s a perfectly valid measure of acceleration”.
Similarly, I have some preference for the somewhat clunkier-sounding “meters per second per second” for acceleration over the alternate “meters per second squared”. The former can be mentally or visually or audibly grouped as “[[meters per second] per second]” making it manifest that it is about the rate of change of a speed.