The Yagoder Effect

/ Ben Yagoda

This went out over the wires a few days ago and was picked up on Twitter:

 
The AP reporter’s mistake is understandable. Scott Israel is a New York native and has a pronounced New York accent.

Thus, if Israel were to say “shiver,” it would indeed come out as “shivva”–so presumably the reporter was correcting for accent. Unfortunately, he or she wasn’t aware of the Jewish tradition of “sitting shiva” for the deceased.

A version of the same thing once happened to me. For many years, I have been a customer of Hitchcock, a purveyor of wide shoes based in Hingham, Massachusetts. One day a Hitchock catalog came in the mail, and on it my name was written as “Ben Yagoder.” A characteristic of the Massachusetts accent, of course, is to add an “r” sound to words that for everyone else ends in a schwa: so, John F. Kennedy’s famously imitated pronunciation of Cuba as “Cuber.”

I figured one of two things happened. One, a Hitchcock staffer made the same mistake as the AP reporter: heard me say “Yagoda,” (somehow) knew I was from New York, and “corrected” me. Or, two, a staffer was so wedded to the “-er” pronunciation that they extended it beyond pronunciation to spelling.

I like theory two.