More about mauve

Last week's post about the pronunciation of "mauve" created quite a stir. I promised that I would tell you more about this word, and here we are.

We owe the popularity of "mauve" in English to a British chemist, William Henry Perkin (1838–1907). As a student at the ripe old age of 18, Perkin was given the task of chemically synthesizing quinine, which was much in demand as an anti-malaria medication and at the time had to be derived from the bark of the cinchona tree.

Tinkering around in his lab with coal-tar derivatives, Perkin created a substance which, as it turned out, was not quinine, and useless against malaria, but fantastic as a colourfast and fade-resistant rich purple colouring matter. He had stumbled upon the first synthetic dye. 

Being a chemist and not a poet, Perkin called it "aniline purple", but he knew he was on to something. Previously, purple dyes had had to be obtained from a Mediterranean shellfish and were so expensive that only royalty wore purple clothes. Still only 19, Perkin plunged his father's life savings into a  factory to produce his dye, which others started to call "Perkin's purple". But two years later, in 1859, the more chic-sounding "mauve", borrowed from French (always our go-to language for fashion), took over. I'm not sad about the demise of "Perkin's purple" because can you imagine having to say, "This year's fashion must-have is this lovely Perkin's purple purse." Mauve quickly became all the rage in the fashion industry and Perkin became a very wealthy man. 

The French had been using mauve to designate a delicate purple colour since the beginning of the 19th century.  It was in fact the name for this plant:

Malva sylvestris

Mauve derived from the Latin name of the plant, malva. English had also borrowed this Latin word, as far back as Anglo-Saxon times, but in English it evolved into "mallow". (The Latin name was also revived in the Renaissance -- of course -- and is now commonly used by gardeners.) 

One variety of mallow is the "marsh mallow"

The roots of this particular mallow yield a mucilaginous substance that has over the centuries been used in medicinal preparations. Starting in the 19th century, it was also used to give the distinctive texture to the pillowy confectionery item we like to put in our s'mores. Nowadays, gum arabic has replaced the actual marsh mallow, but the name has stuck. 

And what is the French word for marshmallow? Guimauve!

For a flower that was even more successful in having a colour named after it, see pink. 

For more plant- and gardening-related posts, click here.

S'mores photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

How do you pronounce "mauve"?

I was talking to an American friend a few weeks ago, when she uttered the word "mauve". It didn't rhyme with "stove" as it does for me and obviously, therefore, should do for all right-minded people. 

The vowel in her "mauve" was what we would traditionally call a "short o", which you might transcribe variously (depending on your accent) as MAWV or MAHHV or MOV. 

Although I wisely refrained from saying, "How odd that you don't know how to pronounce that. How idiosyncratic!", I have to admit I did think it. Not so fast, Wordlady. A few days later, another American said "mauve" the same way. Curiouser and curiouser.

It turns out that Americans have had this variant short-o pronunciation of "mauve" since sometime in the mid-20th century. In the 1934 second edition of Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary of English, only MOHV was given. But in the third edition, published in 1961, the short-o pronunciation appeared, listed second (i.e. the less frequent of the two). Since then, though, this pronunciation has taken over as much the more common one in the US. It is now listed first in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, and is the only one given when you click on the "hear this word pronounced" icon: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mauve

In a recent survey I did of a group of editors, "short-o" outnumbered "long-o" by a factor of two to one among Americans. (I suppose some of them from the Eastern Seaboard with varieties of English in which "tauter" and "totter" are not homophones may have a third pronunciation, like "MORV" without the R.) One of them even said, "I giggle to think it could rhyme with stove!" Another said, "MOHV is only the pronunciation in French, not in English."

But only Americans have this second pronunciation. Canadians, despite living next door, and being subjected to American home decorating and fashion TV shows, only rhyme it with "stove", and this is also true of the rest of the English-speaking world. The results of my survey with Canadians were a whopping 245 to two in favour of "rhymes with stove". Many Canadians are, like me, stunned to learn that a different pronunciation even exists.

Some commentators, however, complain that the now more common US pronunciation is "wrong", because after all the word came from French (more about that next week) and we should pronounce it as the French do. But Lord knows we have borrowed many French words into English and given them non-French pronunciations. We now say "MARGE ah rin" and not "mar ga REEN" for "margarine", for instance. Whatever the majority of speakers say becomes a standard pronunciation.

(Don't get me started on people who pronounce "brioche" bree-OASH instead of bree-OSH though! Just kidding, but it does bug me in spite of myself.)

Quite frankly, I don't know where short-o "mauve" started out in the US, or why. We borrowed "mauve" into English from French in the mid-19th century, so it is not a case of a pre-colonization pronunciation surviving in the US and being replaced by something else in Britain. (For examples of that phenomenon, see clamber, process, lieutenant, height, primer, herb, ancillary.)

It's not that frequent a word, so it's entirely possible that most people encounter it first in writing, and therefore apply the phonetic rules of their native language to the foreign spelling. But why this phenomenon should have happened for "mauve" only in the US and not in the other English-speaking countries, even those that are less influenced by French than Canada is, is still a mystery. 

The same vowel change has happened with earlier 19th- or 18th-century borrowings:

1. the cooking use of "sauté", more commonly pronounced SAW tay than SO tay in both American and Canadian English, - though not the ballet term, which is only SO tay
2. "vaudeville", by now pronounced almost exclusively VAWD vill

No one, to my knowledge, is suggesting that people should say "SO tay" or "VOH dvill" instead, but one never knows with language cranks.

But this vowel change has not happened (yet?) with more recent borrowings from the 20th century:

1. "haute (cuisine etc.)" (mostly 20th century though some 19th)
2. "fauve" (admittedly a specialist term) 
3. "taupe" (also a fairly specialist term except that it is used a lot as a colour designation for pantyhose)
4. "auteur"(also a specialist term)
5. "chauffeur"

I suspect that within a generation, short-o may be the only pronunciation of "mauve" in US English.

There's a lot more to the story of mauve. What does it have to do with s'mores, for instance? Tune in next week for the continuation. 

And don't forget to tell me: long o or short o, how do YOU pronounce "mauve"?


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