Awful Offal?
Over the last couple of weeks, I've noticed a number of foodies pronouncing offal, the organs and whatnot of animals, with a long o. Like "oaffal." I've heard it from enough savvy people that I began to alter my own pronunciation—a rhyme with awful—assuming I had been wrong all this time. Today, I looked it up. My dictionaries only list the "awful" form; they flag the "o" as either the -aw sound in paw or the short-o sound in pot, a distinction of length and harshness but otherwise hard to hear.
So why the sudden rise in the long-o form? Is it a regionalism? Or does some celebrity chef use it? Most of you know by now how much I enjoy language, so I'm curious about this shift.
I assume many see the newly-trendy word, think of its association with French food, and guess that the word uses French's softer, longer vowels. (The term has been around since Middle English, but it has an Old English root.)
But maybe this is a subtle campaign. Puns that take advantage of the rhyme are legion and tiresome. Perhaps this new long-o form is a way to get the term into people's heads without the rhyming connotation of "really bad." Maybe it's a way to make the food sound more elegant, so that people don't immediately veer away when they read it in a trend piece. Could that work? Maybe I'll keep the long-o pronunciation after all.
How do you pronounce this word? And if you use the long-o pronunciation, where did you hear it? I'd love to know.
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