Dialect Blog

Photo: Rachael Ashe

When I was younger, I believed I made the English /r/ sound with my lips.  When I visualized this consonant, I pictured myself making a tight half-pout.  I saw /r/, in essence, as a more emphatic version of/w/.

So it was something of a shock when I took an introductory voice and speech course in college.  My professor (and a prescriptivist speech textbook) taught me that the ‘correct’ way to produce /r/ is by moving the front of one’s tongue to the space behind the upper teeth.  Compounding my confusion was the fact that when I was younger, my /r/ was ‘bunched,’ meaning it involved the back of the tongue, not the front.

This anecdote highlights an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed over the years: people sometimes have off-base perceptions of how they themselves produce the sounds of English. And I’ve noticed what seems to be a pattern. People are aware of movements they make with their lips, but are often unconscious of what they do with their tongue.

Take the /w/ sound. Most non-phonetician types probably assume (as I once assumed) that this sound is made entirely with the lips. The fact that ‘w’ involves tongue movement (lifting the back of the tongue to the soft palate), is something few people would be cognizant of.

The same is probably true of the ‘oo’ sound: many imagine this vowel being made by rounding the lips alone.  Tongue height, of course, is equally if not more important (and I might argue that in some dialects, lip roundedness is an afterthought).  Still, when most people think of ‘oo,’ they think of a pair of lips forming a perfect ‘o.’

So why do the lips seem more on people’s minds than the tongue? I’ve sometimes wonder if this is because the lips are more consistently visible: the first president Bush told the country to ‘Read my lips,’ not to ‘Read the interplay of gestures between my lips and tongue.’  We have a vague notion that the tongue is doing something back there in the darkness, but we’re not quite sure what.

These are obviously personal observations, and hardly universal.  But it does seem that humans assign conscious gestures to entirely unconscious activities, particularly when it comes to talking. Why do we notice some of the movements that create speech while ignoring others?

Something that’s puzzled me about the speech of young British co-workers is the term ‘geezer.’  In America, this word refers, impolitely, to an elderly man.  More accurately, I’d say it’s used more in theory than practice: it’s one of those slang words that everyone understands but is rather archaic-sounding in contemporary language. I hear ‘geezer’ used in movies about insolent teenagers in the 1950’s, but rarely on the lips of my peers.

Regardless, ‘geezer’ means something different in British dialects, where it’s arguably a term of affection directed toward younger people. I say ‘arguably’ because it’s hard to pin down a solid definition of British ‘geezer.’ I’ve heard it equated with ‘bloke,’ but there are shades of meaning here that elude me. The fairly British-centric Collins English dictionary defines the word simply as ‘a man.’  But as with dude, lad, and mate, I doubt this is the whole story.

So how did this word mean such different things in the two dialects? Most dictionaries state that ‘geezer’ is a variation of the rather archaic ‘guiser,’ which refers to a masked or costumed reveler (or ‘mummer’). The word seems linked to the more recognizable French-derived ‘guise.’ (You’ll note a similar association with costumes and masks in the related term ‘disguise.’)

How ‘guiser’ (or rather, its offspring) came to mean both ‘old man’ and ‘bloke’ seems at first obscure, until one sees the natural evolution of the term. Random House dictionary offers a definition of ‘geezer’ that serves as something of a ‘missing link:’ an odd or eccentric man.

It seems the strangeness and exoticism of masked celebration remained part of the word in this stage of its development. But the two contemporary definitions on each side of the Atlantic are still somewhat puzzling. The ‘eccentricity’ of an old man seems to have been the impetus for the American version. But how did the word became a term of fraternal endearment in the UK?

Any other ideas how British ‘geezer’ came to be?