My brother and I have been engaged in a discussion about the derivation of the expression "pigeon towed". Can anyone help us know from whence this expression comes? Is it simply the way that pigeons walk, or is there some deeper meaning?

Huh. I know it as "pigeon-toed."

I saw that too, but i got too caught up in the image of a bunch (flock?) of pigeon's towing away a car..
(Hey where my car? Oh my god, its been pigeon towed!..)
--it could happen, we grow big pigeons here in NYC.

I am not sure if pigeons, more than other birds, have toes that turn in. (i always think of birds as having splayed feet and toes.. but I don't really look at pigeons much, and i am not sure if they are different.

there was some 7 or so years ago, an article in the NYTimes Magazine by a reporter who had a pigeon nest on his window sill.

at first, he had the normal NYer's disgust at the flying rat.. but he started to watch them, and the eggs, and chicks.. and he became over time, enamored. (i don't look at them.. i don't want to become enamored!)

My guess would be: Yes it's simply the way pigeons walk. No there's no deeper meaning. And yes it's spelled 'toed' (which for those from the deep south is one syllable).

I thought it was an amphibian creole.

No, pigeon towed makes sense. To all intensive porpoises, that is.

In a Hydra ulic environ

...of the porpoise in order to express his affection for her trainer, each time she passed by, slapped the man with her tongue

(Adapted from an actual report from Sea World)

You people are insane! In the nicest possible way.

you have no idea.

HA!

Of course towed/toed/toad has just one syllable, wet or dry. (Hi zmjezhd.)

Yeah. They're pronounced just like toward, one syllable.

wet or dry

There's a great monograph by the late Alan Dundes "Wet and Dry: The Evil Eye". In Interpreting Folklore. (Disclaimer, my grandmother made it into a footnote therein.)

I pronounce 'toward' as two syllables. tə'wɔd. If you count tə' as a syllable.

No, no! Toward is one* syllable, yes, but it's tord. Olly, bet you can't say tord! Pookie--wot'm'I gonna do with you?
*usually (heh heh)

I noticed yesterday that Barak Obama makes "Senator Clinton" into two monosyllables, so he could probably manage "tord"

It's yalls silent Dubya that gets us Southerners.

hee hee. What he means is that we are the REAL Southerners, and we say toward not tord.

Actually, it's not only the silent 'w' that gets us, but the voiced 'r' as well. Kiwis and Aussies tend not to pronounce 'r' when it occurs in certain positions such as the end of a word or before a consonant. We say ca not car, aht not art, and bahn not barn, etc. So it's t'wawd to us! (IPA tə'wɔd)

New Englandahs too I think.

Non-rhotics of the world unite I say!

Could rhoticism when it is online on a webpage like this be called e-rhoticism?

USns what knows how ta tawk doesn't so much minds ifn y'all leave out pernouncin the Rs, jus don' be puttin them in there where they don' blong when y'all're writin down how somethin is pernounced.

If I understood you, Kipling is a great example of the practice being appealed against. Like many non-rhotics he would write "ar" for the long a sound similar to the one in "father" when transliterating Hindustani words with "आ" in them although since he grew up speaking Urdu, he would probably have been thinking of the Urdu equivalent which I don't know. He seems to do this only when the transliteration might otherwise leave the length of the "a" unclear, or perhaps only when the Moon was waxing gibbous and the wind was blowing from the southeast, I carn't be sure.

The practice is close to ubiquitous in the non-rhotic world. It's even bullied its way in to official transliterations of some languages. An example is the standard spelling of the Korean family name 팍, which could easily be transliterated Pahk with no confusion at all, is, instead, transliterated Park, and frequently pronounced that way in the rhotic-speaking anglophone world.

I call it the Laura Norder phenonmenon.

Based on experience in life and on several forums (esp. BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth), I have come have the following "totally unscientific personal opinions/assumptions". NB: In no way, am I saying that this is factual, it is just a personal opinion that I built up over time and limited specific observations.

1) Americans are taught that their local dialects/pronunciations are wrong, shameful, etc. I consider this in many ways to be a bad thing, except...

1a) Most Americans regardless of how "oddly" they pronounce a word, will agree (to some extent) on what the "standard" pronunciation(s) is(are), what it rhymes with, and if asked to write it phonetically would come up with something similar. My father (when speaking naturally) says "go 'round the carner to put out the far", but he would be embarassed if you pointed out that he had not said corner and fire and would never say that there is an ah sound in either.

1b) It possible to have a semi-reasonable discussion of pronunciation among most Americans where you can at least agree on what you disagree about.

2) British people are taught that their local dialects/pronunciations are something to be proud of, which in many ways is a good thing, except...

2a) Some (few?) British people will defend to the death that their local one is the correct standard and will not allow the existence of difference yet, much like the Red Queen, insist that everyone else's dialect is also correct.

2b) Some (few?) British people are very difficult to discuss pronunciation with as it is their way or the highway even if they agree that a difference could exist but only "in theory". For example:
2b) i) Law and lore rhyme and should be written the same phonetically - lor. (hence law and order becomes Laura Norder)
2b) ii) The sound represented by schwa has an r as an integral part of it, i.e. the R-colored vowel (aka schwer) is not schwa and a hint of r sound - it is schwa itself! (It was the presenter of the program who is a professor of English who insisted on this point.)

say what?

British people are taught that their local dialects / pronunciations are something to be proud of

This is the opposite of my observation. I have known quite a few from across the pond who had it hammered into them in grammar school and beyond that their accent and dialect were things to be ashamed of mightily.

Trying to describe how a word is pronounced by resorting to rhymes is a less than optimal solution. For me, cot and caught to not rhyme, but for many they do. Same with pin and pen (for me). The best we can hope for in transcribing pronunciations is to use the IPA in conjunction with a detailed phonology of the language / dialect in question. All the rest leads to madness.

My dialect has both a schwa (e.g., sofa /'soʊfə/) and an r-colored schwa (e.g., finger /'fɪŋgɚ/. They are quite distinct. Cf. the popular transcriptions of US um and UK erm which are both basically /əm/.

the Laura Norder phenonmenon Oh, HA! That's funny! But--[skuh-WAWWWWK]! Law and lore do NOT rhyme, any more than all and awl do, i__ega_dless of the added r. And I shall defend to the death my right to say so.

though I hear gararge frequently, I can't remember ever hearing "lor" for law.

all and awl are much, much closer.

You may, but no one will understand you doing it, hahahaha

Australians add an 'r' to the pronunciation of 'law' if it is followed by a word beginning with a vowel. There's a name for it, it's called the linking R I think? As in the example given, Law and Order. We really do say it "Laura Norder" (dropping the 'd' in 'and' and moving the 'n' to the beginning of the next word as well). We do the same with the word 'drawing',' pronouncing it as 'droring'.

The Schwa sound is very important in Australian English, but even more important in Kiwi. They pronounce pretty much every short 'i' sound as 'ə'. So for them ship and sheep are not homophones, though for Aussies they are much closer, not quite the same, but if an Aussie says "ship" they are likely to be misheard by a Kiwi as "sheep". But then Kiwis think everything revolves around sheep anyway.

I never realised that "um" is pronounced "əm" (or "erm" in non-rhotic British transliteration) by Americans. I always thought it was "um" (that is, IPA "ɶm" or "ɑm"). That's how we say the exclamation meaning, "err, ahh, I'm not sure."

Oleh Guapa! At six in the morning I salute you!

is it? not where I come from. erm is separate. but they both mean the same thing.



exactly.

When I wrote the post, I knew that "taught" was a loaded word implying "in school", but I couldn't think of a better one without making the post even more long-winded. I meant something more along the lines of "aquired a attitude from the general environment". The observed end result came about somehow.

Is that a Texas idiom? We would say 'an attitude'.

I like to call it -- and this may be the 'official' name -- the intrusive R.

Many NY(city) english speakers have intrusive R, (and yes, i would understand laura norder (as law and order)

and Moshula parkway is often called Marsha Lou parkway.. (it confused the hell out of me as a child.) there are other examples of the intrusive R.. (and some of them exist in my speech) but for the life of me, i can't think of any others.

Hey, Helen, cute pictures everywhere! Dante Gabriele Rossetti?
Or Edward Burne-Jones ?

Not to confuse things: but as to the original post ...
pigeon toed, the person's feet turn inwards when they are walking. Then there's also "duck foot" where the person's feet turn outward. Often seen in the walk of professional ballet dancers, especially the women.

oh, my avatar...(i was confused by your comment, at first)

i have no idea. I'm not much into avatars.. and on another BB i was one of handful of posters with out one.. another member of that BB said I MUST HAVE ONE. and that i needed a goddess like avatar, (which she provide me with, in an 80 X 80 pixel format) and since avatars have become the norm here, and i had an 80 X80 image handy... i have an avatar. (the goddess is knitting, cause, D'oh)

i can image my self looking like that.. (but anyone who has met me in person might have difficulty!)

Oh, of course, sorry. It was very off topic. But a nice image distracts me. Well, pigeon toes and duck feet are not my strongest point.

No, it's a Texas typo, like aquired for acquired... or is aquired a Tasmanian idiom?

There is a case in French where a consonant is added for phonetic harmony, like with the R mentioned above, however it is a grammatical rule.

We add a « t » in front of the third person singular pronoun (il) if the verb preceding it does not finish in a d or t; this happens when the verb is before the pronoun in a question.

Va-t-il aller à l’école le lundi de Pâques?
(Will he go to school on Easter Sunday?)

Courra-t-elle pour attraper l’autobus?
(Will she run to catch the bus?)

...actually I dint notice the acquired typo!