John Fairbairn wrote:Pincer is definitely the right word, but many in the U.S. pronounce it as a homophone of pincher. It's common enough that Merriam Webster lists the pronunciation in their dictionary as a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) note:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pincer
To say "definitely right" about anything in language is to invite a prat fall
We've had this question before, and I'll repeat what I said then: that pinchers is a normal word in Scotland and northern England for pincers (or pliers). I'm at home with either form but tend nowadays to say pincer. However, it's worth noting that we have a verb+noun form of pinch + pincher but there is no pince + pincer, so pincer has to double up as a verb. Nothing wrong with that, but it suggests to me that pinch/pincher was the original form.
But the real reason I'm posting is to ask a question of the US side of the pond. I watched a DVD called Texas Rising last week and was surprised that two American heroes of the time were apparently given the Scottish rendering of their names. One was Deaf Smith, (?) founder of the Texas Rangers and apparently named after his disability, where Deaf was pronounced deef. That was normal for me as a kid (except that it was always 'stone deef', which usually became 'corned beef' - Cockney is not the only dialect to have rhyming slang). The other was Jim Bowie, pronounced boo-ee (i.e the way Americans say buoy, which we render the same as 'boy'). Can you Americans confirm these pronunciations are normal, and if so why? I have actually noticed an awful lot of apparent Scots influence in American speech (gotten is perhaps one, though it may come from other, English, dialects), and some of Webster's spelling such as 'labor' can also be found in Scots.
Absolutely normal in the 19th century US, and not just in the hills and the South.
(Many US emigres to Texas were from Tennessee, who wished to found a new land for slavery, even though Mexico had outlawed it.) When I studied a little linguistics in college, back before they had a major in it, I learned a couple of relevant things. One is that transplanted languages often change more slowly than they do at home. That is why, for instance, Japanese is a better introduction, I was told by a prof, to ancient Chinese than is modern Chinese. Another is that the closest modern pronunciation to Shakespearean English was at that time in the hills of Tennessee.
Shakespeare with a twang. I love it!
I have a Scotch Irish heritage, but I grew up in the lowlands, on the border between the twang and the drawl. My mother's mother called her mother
mither. She also called a skillet a
spider. It was rare where I lived, but there were people around who pronounced, "Are you deaf?",
Air ye deef? The family across the street said
ye instead of you.
Edit: You mentioned Webster's. When I was little I sometimes sat at table on a very thick copy of Webster's 1840 dictionary, which belonged to my aforementioned grandmother. When I was in high school I had a lot of fun browsing through it.
It contained a number of spellings which have since disappeared.
Edit: BTW, the Scotch Irish immigration to America was not the first wave. When they arrived, they found the coastal areas already inhabited by the English, with the Roundheads largely in the North and the Cavaliers largely in the South. That's why they headed for the hills.
Edit: Where I live now, in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a MacBeeth's Lumber Company. I wonder how Shakespeare pronounced the name?
