GREASE

Wild Word Friday!

Our word today is GREASE.  When I think of the word GREASE, sensory images bombard: the yucky feel of cold bacon grease as I try to scrape it out of a pan, the taste of bear meat (which is very tallowy), and the sight of GREASE congealed on a serving plate.  Hope you’re not about to partake of a meal…

However, let’s leave the sensory and look at the word GREASE as a linguist might.  If you were raised in the US, Britain, Canada or Australia, the way you pronounce GREASE, may be indicative of your family origins or the ancestral origin of your childhood friends, neighbors, and teachers.  The word GREASE came into English by way of the Latin (crassus – fat or thick), Low Latin (crassia), Old French (gresse) and Middle English (gresse, grese).

If you pronounce GREASE with a sibilant S sound, a linguist will say that you are using an “unvoiced” consonant.  If you pronounce it with a Z sound, the last consonant of the word is “voiced.”  Cup your hand around your throat and say GREASE using the sibilant S sound.  Notice how you can feel your vocal cords vibrate with the GR but not with the S.  Now say GREAZE.  You can feel your vocal cords vibrate with the Z as well.  The S sound  is unvoiced (no vocal cord vibration) and the Z is voiced (vocal cord vibration).

If you would have lived in Southern England during the late 11th century to the 14th century, you would have pronounced GREASE with what we consider to be a Z sound.  If you lived in the more northern regions of England, you would use the sibilant S.

If your family or the people in your childhood neighborhood or school were a conglomeration of northern and southern, you are more likely to have “chosen” the speech patterns of the person who seemed most dominant or important to you.  The caregiver parent is the one who usually passes his or her speech patterns to the children of the family, but later in life those pronunciations are often strongly influenced by friends, teachers, and spouses.

Q4U:  Are you a Z or an S?  Is that because of family pronunciation or because the people in your neck of the woods used that particular pronunciation?

Blessings,

Sue

(Photo by Made2Order555, in Public Domain)