1174. This week, we look at why we pronounce "Iran" and "Iraq" differently and what those pronunciations reveal about our political beliefs. Then, we look at the "smelly" words that confuse people, including "odorous," which started out meaning "fragrant" but now mostly describes bad smells.
1174. This week, we look at why we pronounce "Iran" and "Iraq" differently and what those pronunciations reveal about our political beliefs. Then, we look at the "smelly" words that confuse people, including "odorous," which started out meaning "fragrant" but now mostly describes bad smells.
The "Iran" segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of the soon-to-be-released book "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." A version of it originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license. And you can find Valerie at valeriefridland.com.
🔗 Share your familect recording in Speakpipe or by leaving a voicemail at833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)
🔗 Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
🔗 Subscribe to the newsletter.
🔗 Take our advertising survey.
🔗 Find an edited transcript.
🔗 Get Grammar Girl books.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Threads. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon. Bluesky.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty.
Last week, I looked up how to pronounce "Iran" for the piece on toponyms, along with 15 other words — that piece was a pronunciation beast — so I'm pleased to have the first piece today by Valerie Fridland on why people pronounce "Iran" in different ways.
It's actually a joke in my family that if there's a vowel in a name, I'm sure to pick the wrong way to say it. There's a grocery store in Arizona called Bashas that I called Bah-shuhs. And apparently, last week, I still even pronounced Genoa wrong. So sorry!
And then after that segment, we'll talk about words for smells.
This next piece is by Valerie.
By Valerie Fridland
With the war in Iran on everyone’s lips, you might have noticed an inconsistency in the way that nation’s name is said, varying between a more native-like “Ih-ron” pronunciation and a more Americanized “Ih-ran” one.
An everyday listener might just chalk this up as being the result of regional differences or the version we learned growing up, like the alternate ways Americans have of referring to information as "day-duh" or "daah-tuh" and the thing on top of our house as a "roof" or a "ruff."
But as a linguist who studies what our accents reveal about our histories and social identities, I know that the way we pronounce things often gives off clues about who we are and what we believe in.
That appears to be the case with these two distinct pronunciations.
It’s probably not a big surprise to learn that listeners often hear certain words or accents as indicating someone’s political inclinations.
That’s because people are primed to notice patterns that mark group membership – be it a style of clothes or pronouncing “fire” more like “far.” Once they notice these patterns, people then tend to assign whatever traits are believed to characterize that group to the sounds of their speech.
For instance, in 2018, researchers examined how people perceived potential political candidates with a Southern vs. non-Southern American accent and found that listeners perceived Southern-sounding politicians as more likely to be conservative and to hold right-leaning views on issues such as gun rights and abortion. All that from hearing someone pronounce “pin” like “pen” or say “bah bah” for “bye.”
This suggests that even a small difference in the way a vowel is pronounced can suggest a lot more about political ideology than you might imagine, even if that suggestion isn't always accurate.
Going back to the question of what drives variation in the pronunciation of Iran, a linguistic study examining politics and pronunciation during the Iraq War offers some insight.
In analyzing 2007 House of Representatives debates about sending more U.S. troops to Iraq, linguists found that a congress member’s political party affiliation was the strongest predictor of how the “a” vowel in Iraq was pronounced.
Republicans preferred the anglicized short “a” pronunciation closer to “ear-RACK,” while Democrats preferred a more “ah”-like one, as in “ear-ROCK.” The authors suggest that the Democratic preference, approximating a more native pronunciation, was motivated by greater multicultural sensitivity.
On the other hand, even though people can also pronounce the "i" vowel in a more anglicized way — as in “EYE-rack" and "EYE-rock,” the difference between those pronunciations and "IHR-rack" and "IHR-rock," didn't significantly correlate with partisanship.
Two later studies, in 2011 and 2018, of everyday speakers who were asked to pronounce "Iraq" in nonpolitical contexts discovered no significant difference by political affiliation. The biggest predictor favoring an “ear-ROCK” pronunciation was that a person spoke multiple languages, as the “ah” vowel sound is more frequent in second languages commonly spoken in the U.S., such as Spanish, French, and Italian.
However, despite the fact that vowel choice doesn't actually align with the political leanings of everyday speakers, when people in the 2018 study were explicitly asked about how saying “ear-RACK” or “ear-ROCK” tied into political views, they did say the “ah” pronunciation was linked with liberalism, and the association was particularly strong for people who used the “ah” pronunciation and were liberal themselves.
This suggests that people might have picked up on this pattern from hearing politicians. They were aware of the fact that this vowel variation had become, in relevant contexts, symbolic of liberal vs. conservative stances.
In looking more generally at the pronunciation of borrowed words written with the letter “a,” like that of “pasta” or “tobacco,” linguist Charles Boberg suggests that Americans generally follow two possible paths, either pronouncing it with the short “a” like in “bat” or with the “ah” like in “father.”
Boberg suggests that people's attitudes play a role. Since many Americans associate the “ah” pronunciation with more education and sophistication, given its connection to upper-crust British use in words like “bath” or “aunt,” there has been an increasing tendency for Americans to use “ah” in words borrowed since World War II, as with “origami” or “nacho.”
But in looking at variability in the pronunciation of "Iraq," other linguists hypothesized that the “ah” vowel is only heard as more sophisticated when a source language is held in high esteem – as with the British-derived “ah” in “aunt” – or when those speaking foreign languages are well regarded.
In contrast, when there is less respect for a people or a place, the choice of an Americanized vowel rather than the more accurate native one might be preferred. This difference in attitudes may well explain much of the variation in politicians’ pronunciation of "Iraq" – and possibly "Iran."
Not surprisingly, in their study of how members of congress pronounce "Iraq," these researchers found that, beyond party affiliation, the politician’s war stance – for or against sending additional troops – was a significant determinant of which vowel was used. If they used the “ear-RACK” pronunciation, they were more likely to favor sending more troops to the country.
When politics around an issue fades, pronunciation differences can fade as well. For example, a similar linguistic contrast existed during the Vietnam War, when “VietNAM” was commonly pronounced as having the same short “a” sound as in “bat,” including from the lips of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Now, years later, the “VietNOM” pronunciation dominates, and the “NAM” version is virtually absent in those born in more recent times.
In the end, vowels and accents have always told a fascinating story about our politics, and we can hope for a future with peace. And maybe a shared pronunciation will follow.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and author of the soon-to-be-released book "Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents." A version of it originally appeared in The Conversation and appears here through a Creative Commons license. And you can find Valerie at valeriefridland.com.
by Mignon Fogarty
Next, let's talk about some confusing words we can use when things stink.
“Odorous,” “malodorous,” and “odoriferous” are all ways of describing a smell, and ultimately they all go back to the same Latin root that meant “a smell or a scent."
“Odorous” was originally a nice smell. Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary of the English Language from 1818 defines it only positively: “fragrant; perfumed, sweet of scent.” One example he included is from Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet 64,” which compares the scent of a woman to various flowers: “Such fragrant flowers do give most odorous smell.”
But as you know, the meaning of words can change, and today something that's “odorous" can have a good or bad smell, and people seem to use it most often for the icky ones. Here’s an example from the Robin Paige mystery “Death at Rottingdean”:
So he took the coin, pocketed his reservations, and hurried off to the White Horse, where The Coffin (as the odorous old coach was known) was about to begin its afternoon run to Brighton.
Of the 98 examples of the word "odorous" in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, 77 describe something unpleasant, like rotting waste and "odorous green gunk."
“Odorous” also often appears in scientific writing to simply describe something that has a scent. Here’s an example from a physiological psychology textbook:
Very odorous compounds may require less solubility because relatively few molecules need to reach the receptors.
That kind of neutral scientific or technical use accounts for about 10% of the examples on the COCA site.
Moving on to “malodorous,” the “mal-“ prefix in “malodorous” means “bad,” just as it does in “malformed,” “maltreated,” and “maladjusted.” Some less obvious words that use the “mal-“ prefix to mean “bad” include “malaise” (which means bad ease), “malady” (which means roughly “badness that is had or received”), “malaria” (which means bad air) and “malevolent” (which means bad wishing).
So, by now, you’ve probably guessed that “malodorous” is reserved for bad smells. In general, I’d say malodorous smells are worse than odorous smells. For example, you could say:
The malodorous entrails made Squiggly gag.
Poor Squiggly!
Next, the least common of these three words to describe smells is “odoriferous.” According to a Google Books search, it was actually the most common of the three words in 1800, but it’s been declining ever since.
Like “odorous,” “odoriferous” originally described a pleasant smell, can now describe good or bad smells, and is most often used for bad smells. (Although “Garner’s Modern English Usage” continues to say "odoriferous" should be reserved for good smells, a COCA search shows that the dominant meaning in actual use is negative, at least in that database.)
Interestingly, “odoriferous” comes from the same Latin “odor” root combined with the word for “to bear or to carry.” So it means “to bear or carry a scent.”
And now, we have to talk about a word that some people mistakenly use for smells: “odious.” It sounds a lot like “odorous,” but “odious” comes from a Latin word that meant “hatred,” and you use it as an adjective to describe something that is offensive, repulsive, or deserving of hate. And I immediately thought of "odious" when I was studying Spanish and learned that the verb meaning "hate" is "odiar."
But because English speakers are confused about this word, sentences like this create problems:
• Squiggly found cleaning fish to be an odious task.
You can find something smelly to be offensive, repulsive, or deserving of hate. So does Squiggly dislike cleaning fish because it grosses him out in general, or does he just think it's smelly? It could be both an odorous and odious task.
My advice is to be careful when using “odious.” Although it wouldn’t be wrong to use it in a sentence where it could mean the task was repulsive because it was smelly, if you want to focus on the task being hateful instead of smelly, you can find better words.
To me, something like “Reading online comments can be an odious task” is clear, but “Squiggly found cleaning fish to be an odious task” risks confusing some readers who might confuse “odious” with “odorous” because of the context and the similar sound.
Finally, another word for smells that often confuses people is “noisome." It sounds like “noisy,” but that’s not what it means. A noisome problem offends your nose, not your ears.
It comes from the same root as the word "annoy" and can also describe something that's more broadly offensive or disgusting, but in practice, it's almost always used to describe smells. Think of something "noisome" as something that annoys your nose.
Here’s an example from an 1874 book called “Tiny Travelers.”
“There is a good deal of mud deposited at the bottom of the canals, which, when disturbed by barges, produces a most noisome effluvium.”
And it’s no coincidence that the example is from the 1800s because “noisome” is falling out of favor. A Google Ngram search shows that it was used much more often in the early 1800s than it is today (although it took a small uptick around the year 2000, and I'm not sure what's up with that).
But to sum up, “odorous,” “malodorous,” “odoriferous,” and "noisome" all describe things that smell. If you want to describe a bad smell, “malodorous” is probably the safest choice. Remember that the "mal-" prefix means bad.
"Odorous" can have a more neutral meaning, and people are just generally confused about what "noisome" means.
Also, these all sound like $10 words to me, so consider whether something simpler like “smelly” or “fragrant” might be a better choice.
Finally, “odious” doesn’t specifically mean “smelly” at all. You could use it to describe something smelly if it were offensive or repulsive, but think twice before using it to describe something offensive that isn't smelly because people confuse it with “odorous.”
And no matter which word you use, I hope you don't have many occasions this week to describe things that are either malodorous or odious.
Finally, I have a familect story from Steve:
"Hi Mignon, my name is Steve Chernikoff and I'm calling with a familect. My aunt, who unfortunately just recently passed away, had a preternatural ability to find spots as close as possible to where she needed to be—the spot by the front door of the mall or close to the gate at the stadium, etc. So in my family, we call those Aunt Jan spots because of her ability to find them so easily. Thank you, I love the podcast and I look forward to hearing this again."
Thanks so much, Steve. Familects are a great way to keep the memories of our loved ones alive.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to Morgan Christianson; Rebekah Sebastian; Holly Hutchings; Dan Feierabend; Steven Schapansky; Nat Hoopes; and Maram Elnagheeb, whose first name is a palindrome.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.