The colour that is tearing families apart

3 months ago 15

Imagine the confusion in the Twigg household. The trigger was the Wordle back in June. Sheryl and her daughter Keira pitched their daily battle, seeking to reveal the mystery words in fewer moves, though the real contest lay in how to say the eventual answer.

As Sheryl explains, “I say TAUPE so that it rhymes with Thorpe, while my daughter insists the colour rhymes with rope. Both of us were adamant. In fact, we’d only realised we reached the same answer after looking at each other’s phones.”

Taupe, a truly horrible colour. But do you say it like “rope” or “warp”?

So who’s right? Thorpe or rope? Suddenly, I was magistrate in Twigg v English, compelling me to consult the original French. Brownish-grey on the spectrum, taupe derives from mole whose fur displays the in-between shade. Alas, French has an in-between way of saying the word, going closer to rope in rhyme yet longer in duration, the vowel somehow shorter.

Acting as mole on behalf of the Twiggs, I ran a radio survey across Victoria. Pick a rhyme: rope or warp. Hundreds replied. Ninety-five per cent stood in the warp camp, despite Collins (UK) and Merriam-Webster (US) favouring the rope echo. The Macquarie has a bob each way, promoting warp over rope, leaving us lost in the brownish-grey murk of indecision.

English has a subset of such foggy words, as the data (darter versus dater) suggests. Does schedule start with a sh- or sk-sound? Is mack or mash implicated in machination? Most lexicons tell their user either (or either). Pick one already! You say tomato, I say tomato, so let’s stop arguing about tomatoes.

Does schedule start with a sh- or sk-sound? Is mack or mash implicated in machination?

I’ve spoken before about Gen-Z, which zedders themselves call zee, while the un-zee crowd prefers zed. In short, chaos. American English provides many of these shibboleths, those words setting two tribes apart. When Bobby Troup – who doesn’t rhyme with taupe – wrote the Route 66 song, his stanza backed root as a homophone, despite the modern American, and younger Australian, deeming route to match rout in sound.

Abandoning French moles and US highways, let’s meet the cute but confusing Leadbeater’s possum. Apostrophe kerfuffle aside, Victoria’s faunal emblem is one phonetic mess. I’ve sifted a dozen videos where zoologists (that’s zoo-ologist, or zo-ologist) will suggest the eponymous taxidermist – John Leadbeater – rhymes with bed-heater, while others assume red-setter is a closer fit.

At Zoos Victoria, comms writer (and linguistics graduate) Hugh Leitwell replied “general consensus among conservationists is LeadbEATer. However, as the animals were named after John Leadbeater in the late 19th century, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been a vowel shift over time.” Intrigued, I contacted an Adelaide business consultant named Adrian Leadbeater, seeking the possum gospel from the horse’s mouth.

Adrian wrote back: “I’ve spent most of my early life correcting people who read Leadbeater (bed-heater) and say Leadbetter (red-setter). I can confirm bed-heater is the correct rhyme. My parents told me that my family trade was blacksmithing back in the day, though I’m not sure why they didn’t stick to Smith.”

Lastly, let’s travel to Japan in a bid to settle the ongoing Studio Ghibli quarrel. In the spirit of the eternal GIF tiff over social media: is Ghibli’s G soft or hard? Well, if you consider that animator Hayao Miyazaki based his studio’s trademark on the nickname of an Italian scouting plane – a word that’s derived from the Libyan Arabic word for a hot wind – then I’ll let you dig your own mole-hole.

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