Asphalt and Groceries

A few years ago, my friend Veronica started ranting at me about Americans' pronunciation of grocery. "They all say groshery," she said. Since then, I can't help but hear this pronunciation everywhere, even on National Public Radio. I'm not sure how widespread it is or that it is just American; I think I have heard it in Canada too, but in a city like Toronto it's hard to say where people are from.

I don't know how this pronunciation arises. Perhaps in moving from a back vowel [o] through an alveolar sibilant [s] and in preparing itself for the liquid [r], the mouth can't help but tend towards producing a palatal fricative. Or perhaps the e after the c is "fronty" enough to produce palatalization. I don't know. But once you notice people saying "groshery," you start to hear it everywhere. And it begins to strike you as a form of gaucherie.

No better is "ashphalt." But here I think we are seeing folk etymology at work. In other words, some folks are a little stymied by the word asphalt (it is rather opaque), and since the stuff is sort of black and smelly, they have decided that the first syllable is really our friendly and familiar English word ash.

Incidentally, asphalt has been around in English since the 14th century, which is much earlier than I would have guessed. The OED cites John Trevisa's 1398 definition of Asphaltis: "glewe of Iudea is erthe of blacke colour and is heuy and stinkynge."

Folk etymology is a fairly common agent of linguistic change. Sometimes it happens when a word is introduced from a foreign language—the above is an example of this, as is sparrowgrass from asparagus.

At other times, a native word has an obsolete element no longer understood by speakers and another, more transparent form is substituted—for instance, bridegroom, from Old English brydguma (compare German Bräutigam), where the second element guma, meaning "man, hero," had ceased to be understood by the 16th century and was replaced by groom, meaning "lad." We might still be toasting the bride and goom if this hadn't happened!