1156. This week, we look at the pronunciation chaos surrounding "forte" and "pianoforte," from the French fencing term meaning "strong point" to the Italian musical direction meaning "loud." Then, we look at "playing the dozens" — the African American insult game with a mysterious origin.
1156. This week, we look at the pronunciation chaos surrounding "forte" and "pianoforte," from the French fencing term meaning "strong point" to the Italian musical direction meaning "loud." Then, we look at "playing the dozens" — the African American insult game with a mysterious origin.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and today, we're going to talk about a tricky pronunciation and a game called "the dozens."
by Mignon Fogarty
A couple of weeks ago, I pronounced the name of a keyboard instrument ("pianoforte") as "piano-fort" — and I did it on purpose after checking multiple dictionaries.
I always thought it was pronounced "piano-FOR-tay," but I often check pronunciation when it's not a word I use every day, and dictionaries seemed to tell me otherwise. It was clear there were multiple possible pronunciations, but "piano-fort" seemed to be the one most dictionaries favored for American English. But it turns out a lot of you thought it was "piano-FOR-tay" too, and there is a similar more common word that also causes confusion, so let's learn more!
First, for "piano-fort/fortay, here's an overview of what I found:
Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com both put the pronunciation "pee-ANNA-fort" first, but both follow it with other acceptable pronunciations such as "PEE-anna-fortee." Dictionary.com actually has five possible pronunciations, and the Oxford English Dictionary has two different British pronunciations: "pee-an-oh-FOR-tee" (first) and "pee-an-oh-FOR-tay" (second).
So that's an interesting exercise, but you probably don't talk about "piano-forts" or "pianofortays" very often. There's also a more common word, though, that has the same problem: F-O-R-T-E. As in, "Oh, yes, grammar is my 'fortay'!" Or is that "fort"? Or if you're British, it might be your "foh-tee."
And besides referring to a strength, this word can also mean to play something loudly in music.
The pronunciation problem here arose because this one word with the single spelling is actually two different words borrowed into English from two different sources.
The first "forte" entered English from French in the 1600s. It originally referred to the strongest part of a sword blade — the section between the middle and the hilt. The opposite end, near the tip, was called the "foible" — which now means a minor weakness. So we got both words from fencing. From that literal meaning, "forte" developed a metaphorical sense: your strong point, the thing you do best. And because this word came from French, where it is spelled without the E on the end, the traditional English pronunciation was one syllable, like "fort." I'm told that in French, you don't pronounce the T on the end, so it's more like "for."
The second "forte" — the musical term — came from Italian, probably in the early 1700s, as a term meaning "loud." It's the opposite of "piano," which means "soft." When musicians see the marking "f" or "forte" in a score, they play that passage loudly. It is spelled with an E at the end in Italian, and in that language, the word has always been pronounced with two syllables: "FOR-tay."
And this is where things got complicated. In English, both words ended up with the same spelling. And over time, the Italian pronunciation started bleeding into the French-derived word.
As Michael Quinion notes at World Wide Words, the influence of the Italian word is "too strong and is winning." He says that in British English, both words are now commonly pronounced the same way — typically "FOR-tee."
Dictionary.com says most Americans now say they're strong in something by saying it is their "FOR-tay," especially "younger educated speakers," and speculates that they are confusing it with the musical term, "forte."
The American Heritage Dictionary backs this up with actual survey data. In both their 1996 and 2016 Usage Panel surveys, 74 percent of respondents preferred the two-syllable pronunciation "FOR-tay" for the "strong point" meaning. Even though some panel members argued for that pronunciation to be reserved for the music term.
Bryan Garner, in his influential Garner's Modern English Usage, gives "FOR-tay," the two-syllable pronunciation, his highest rating: stage 5 on the Language-Change Index, meaning "fully accepted." He notes that the word "has long been thought to be preferably pronounced with one syllable, like 'fort'" because of its French origins, but acknowledges that "most speakers of American English use the two-syllable version" and that "the two-syllable version can no longer be condemned." Garner does draw one line, though: he considers the stress-shifted pronunciation "for-TAY" (with emphasis on the second syllable) to be pretentious, and he says the same thing about spelling it with an acute accent over the E.
Now we can circle back to where we started. "Pianoforte" is actually Italian through and through. According to Etymonline, it comes from the Italian phrase "piano e forte," meaning "soft and loud." The Metropolitan Museum of Art says the poet and journalist Scipione Maffei first used the name "gravicembalo col piano e forte" — harpsichord with soft and loud — in 1711, when describing an instrument invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700. Cristofori had created something revolutionary: a keyboard instrument where you could vary the volume by changing how hard you pressed the keys. (The harpsichord couldn't do this.) Over time, the long Italian name got shortened to "pianoforte" or "fortepiano," and eventually just to "piano."
Because "pianoforte" is Italian, you might expect everyone to pronounce the "forte" part the Italian way: with two syllables. And I get the sense that this is what musicians do. But according to dictionaries, the French pronunciation is making a strong move for this fully Italian-derived word. And people are calling it a "piano-fort." It's the opposite of what is happening with the "strong" meaning, where the Italian pronunciation is overtaking the French. No meaning is sticking to its pronunciation roots!
The bottom line is that F-O-R-T-E is really two words with the same spelling. The French-derived one — meaning your strong point — was traditionally pronounced like "fort." But most Americans now say "FOR-tay," and the Italian musical term has always been two syllables. And dictionaries accept all of these pronunciations as standard.
For "pianoforte," you can pronounce the ending as "fort," "for-tay," or even "for-te," the British way. When I said "piano-fort" on the show, I was using the first pronunciation listed in two American dictionaries. But if you've always said "piano-for-tay," that's strongly connected to its origin, and musicians will approve.
Merriam-Webster puts it best: no matter which pronunciation you choose, "they are all considered standard and do not affect the meaning of the word." Sometimes language just gives us options, and this is one of those cases. Linguistic flexibility has always been one of English's strong points. Its forte, you might say — however you want to pronounce it.
Sources
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by Mignon Fogarty
Next, multiple people highlighted a "dozens" phrase that I missed in the same episode two weeks ago. Here's one caller:
Hi. I was wondering after your episode the other day and when you were talking about dozens, and it got me to thinking. I thought maybe you might mention in Black vernacular, the dozens when, you know, insulting people. I just thought I would mention that. Thank you.
Thank you! I had never heard of "the dozens" before, but I have seen competitions with "yo mama" jokes, which I'm told is a similar thing. So "playing the dozens" is an African American ritualized insult game.
For example, Encyclopedia Britannica says that when playing the dozens, two people trade increasingly inventive insults, usually in front of an audience that reacts and encourages escalation. Many variations focus on insults about a relative (often someone's mother), and some versions use rhymed couplets.
The game goes by many names, including sounding, capping, joning, snapping, ranking, and busting. The name "the dozens" feels especially unconnected to what's going on though and is hard to trace.
The first academic report came in 1939 from Yale psychologist John Dollard, and he admitted he didn't know where the name originated, although he suggested it might come from a twelve-part rhyme that was popular at the time. According to Etymonline, the first written evidence of people using "the dozens" in this way appeared in 1928. And researchers have been debating the origin ever since.
One widely repeated modern account says that enslaved people considered damaged or less valuable were grouped into lots of twelve and sold cheaply by the dozen. A 1990 piece by Mona Lisa Saloy called "African American oral traditions in Louisiana" says "to toughen their hearts against the continual verbal assault inflicted on them as part of the 'dozens,' Blacks practiced insulting each other indirectly by attacking the most sacred 'mother' of the other. The person who loses his 'cool' and comes to blows loses the contest. The person who outwits and out–insults the other while keeping a 'cool' head is the winner."
But the Oxford English Dictionary lists six other theories, saying the most likely is that it comes from an early version of the game in which "each player delivered and received twelve insults."
The other theories are that the name comes from the word "bulldoze," which in the 1870s meant "a severe beating," since the game was about verbally thrashing your opponent.
Or that the name comes from an old Scots verb "to dozen," meaning to stun or stupefy — related to "daze" — speculating that this sense fits the players' goal of rattling their opponents with their wit.
Or that it comes from the phrase "dirty dozen," which was used as the name for an earlier version of the game where the insults were especially raunchy.
Or it's a reference to how many sexual partners a player would accuse the opponent's mother of having, or it comes from two sixes being a bad throw in the game craps.
So as you can tell, there's been a lot of speculation and disagreement about the origin.
But what researchers DO seem more confident about is that the practice has roots in West Africa. Amuzie Chimezie, writing in the Journal of Black Studies in 1976, connects the dozens to a Nigerian game called "Ikocha Nkocha" — meaning literally "making disparaging remarks." And similar traditions appear in Ghana.
In America, the tradition may have had other uses too, such as being a way to practice keeping your cool while someone insulted your family for people living in a society where losing your temper could be dangerous.
So thanks to the people who told me about the dozens! It's a traditional African American verbal game, probably rooted in West African traditions and adapted over many years. The name might come from slave auctions, from the number of insults people trade, or from somewhere else — people don't seem to know for sure. But the practice rests on a long tradition of verbal dexterity in Black culture and persists in comedy roasts, rap battles, and schoolyards where kids trade "yo' mama" jokes probably without even knowing they're participating in something with such a long history.
Finally, I have a familect story from Bill.
"We used to babysit for the child of a friend, and when that child was just learning how to talk, she had some peculiar ways of pronouncing things that we took on ourselves. For example, when driving in the car and we wanted to turn on the air conditioner, she would say, 'Put the disher!' And so after that point, my partner and I would say that whenever we wanted to turn on the air conditioner. And another one was the way she pronounced the word 'orange' as 'ornish.' And that was another thing that we took on and pronounced orange as 'ornish.' So, 'Would you peel me an ornish?' for example."
Thanks, Bill. People love familects. I recently talked about them on WOSU in Ohio, and we got lots of calls. So if you want to share your story, look for instructions in the show notes.
Finally, thanks to all our Grammarpaloozians old — and new — over on Patreon. Your support is a huge help, and I love making all the little crossword puzzles and extra tips you get each week. If you want to join us, visit Patreon.com/grammargirl.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Welcome to our new Podcast Associate, Maram Elnagheeb, and thanks to Rebekah Sebastian, Nat Hoopes, Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, and audio producer Dan Feierabend, who went to both a thrash metal and a classical music concert on his recent vacation to Portland, Oregon.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That's all. Thanks for listening.