So you know how in American English, the word vase is often pronounced /vɑz/ when describing an expensive or elegant item, and /vejs/ when talking about something more everyday and cheapo?
Well when I was a child I did the same thing with sew, using the spelling pronunciation /su/ — which I perceived as fancier or more old-fashioned — when talking about expensive or elegant needlework or whatever, and the conventional pronunciation /sow/, which I frequently spelled sow, when talking about more everyday needlework. So I might've said a hand-{sewn|/sun/} dress for the fairy tale princess but a {sown|/sown/}-on button on my second-hand jeans — though keep in mind that these weren't necessarily strict and absolute distinctions, just overall tendencies.
My running theory for how I ended up inventing this distinction "out of thin air" is that I had conflated the words to sew and to sow: a seed drill and sewing machine after all both move over a flat surface to make holes in it at regular intervals, into which they quickly insert something, so people kinda do sow fields with seed in the same way as they sow shirts with thread. And then because I already believed these to be the same word, then seeing the same word with both a spelling that makes sense and a spelling that doesn't, caused me to rationalize the irregular spelling as representing some sort of archaic variant pronunciation — which I could then use when I wanted to sound fancy.
And yeah, once you make that sort of rationalization, then confirmation bias can take you a long way. But with time I did end up getting corrected and eventually I just stopped making the distinction.
Which is maybe a bit of a shame, because it would've been pretty cool to make that kind of distinction.
i don't have anything to add other than that this is a cool post and i wish we had more idiolect posting on hexbear
Then you're in luck cause I've already made a few other posts about my childhood idiolect, including
I've also posted about a more recent addition to my idiolect, namely di as a shortening of diarrhea, and I'm slowly but surely writing up a dictionary of my idiolect and familect, and have a few other words from my childhood idiolect that I would like to share eventually.
I thought "great minds think alike" was "grapevines think alike" because of how Americans pronounce the t as a glottal stop (and I mistook the m for a v I guess)
I thought it had something to do with family trees~grapevines because I heard it in reference to two people who were related
Damn I wish I were you.
As in, you wish you had more of your own anecdotes about how you said words wrong as a child in interesting ways? In my case the primary culprit behind why I had so many idiosyncrasies in how I talked was because English was the primary language of the home and Norwegian was the primary language of public education, leading the languages not only to influence each other, but also the simple fact of the languages being relegated only to certain contexts just left more gaps to fill with my own imagination.
It was half in jest, but I find these linguistic quirks very cool and wish I had some of my own to share!
There's probably something but all I can think of is my cousin saying "willn't" as a kid (he claims it was a joke and he's probably right, but that's not how I remember it).
technically every post is an idiolect post if you take a fine-tooth comb to them