It’s no secret that English is a tough language for non-native speakers to learn. Back in my student days, when I drove taxis part-time, I remember a fellow (non-Australian born) driver flipping anxiously through his street directory (that alone should tell you how long ago it was), trying to find “Strachan Street”. When I showed him the correct spelling, he was dumbfounded. “Strack-an? How the hell do you get ‘Strawn’ from that?”
Well, this is the language which has ten different pronunciations of the “ough” letter group.
Back when the fledgling United States was throwing off the shackles of British rule, one American lexicographer tried to throw off some of the weirder chains of the English language.
Noah Webster sought to oust those maverick Britishisms from his dictionary. Gaol and anaemia had to go. Axe and cheque. Same for the arsey-versey tail of theatre, the redundant u in colour.
Like his namesake, Noah determined which passengers made the cut, leaving traveller (with two ls) and draught out of his manifest, sailing onward with licence (both verb and noun) and dialog as per the program.
Some of Webster’s attempts to simplify a complex language were apparently too silly even for Americans, though.
Novelties like masheen and soop, dorter and thum, dwindled in transit, while most of that doughty ough-mob still found a home in America, from bough to wrought. Nonetheless, Webster’s own war of independence left its mark on US grammar, where ploughs are plows and noughts are nowhere to be seen.
Then there’s doughnut/donut.
Dutch settlers brought the treat to New Amsterdam, knowing them as olykoeks (or oily cakes). To chase a profit, you don’t need a marketing degree to see that name’s turn-off potential, the spruikers soon pushing the tastier alternative of doughnut.
The nut part is no hardware allusion, but more in line with gingernut, the botanical notion of a hand-held snack.
But if you thought “donut” is another of Webster’s neologisms which is ubiquitous in America, you’d be surprisingly wrong.
The dough side of things has long been the American default, even favoured by Krispy Kreme chain, or the prose of Bill Bryson and John Updike.
Indeed, the villain in this Story of O isn’t Noah Webster, as first suspected, but a Boston entrepreneur called William Rosenberg. In 1950, after dabbling in steel and sandwiches, Rosenberg opened a store called Open Kettle, later branded as Dunkin’ Donuts.
So, in the land where scones are called “biscuits” and biscuits “cookies”, it turns out that how one spells the name of the humble oily cake is as arbitrary as anything else in the English language.
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