Over on Bluesky last month, I was pulled into a conversation that went something like this:
- Someone tweets a screenshot of a comment with the phrase Do you baulk at the film reviews...?
- Someone American asks "how long have y'all been adding a u to balk?"
- And then, predictably, some respondents say it's always been there, Noah Webster took it out.
The Oxford English Dictionary has it as balk. Since it comes from Old English, it only got a 'u' after French had influenced (I am tempted to say 'infected') the spelling system. The 'u' came into the word in the 1600s and 1700s, and today the spelling is very mixed in BrE. British National Corpus has 21 baulked/13 balked, more recent Corpus of Global Web-Based English has 71 baulked/93 balked in BrE. Cambridge, Chambers & Collins Dictionary all list balk first as does the Guardian Style Guide.
Most u/non-u variations in BrE and AmE involve an o—as in words like colo(u)r and mo(u)ld. The variation can probably be blamed on Samuel Johnson as much as Noah Webster. In the 18th-century, not all British dictionaries put a u in words like colo(u)r, but Johnson did, and his dictionary became far more famous than the others, so the u form eventually became standard in BrE. I write about the ou/o spellings at this old post (and much more and much better in in The Prodigal Tongue). But even Johnson spelled balk without the u.
My attention to the -o(u)- words in the book meant I overlooked balk/baulk—but I used the word balked in chapter 7:
...please seemed inappropriate in the small request situation, and so Americans balked at it.
The British copyeditor did not bat an eyelash—or a blue pencil—at it.
Given the dictionaries' agreement, we can say that balk is the "standard" spelling of the verb in BrE. Given the corpus numbers, we can say that it is the "normal" spelling. Given the word's history, we can say it is the "original" spelling.
But those corpus numbers aren't so distinct, and given the conversation on Bluesky, it seems that some BrE writers really want to spell it with a u (and to believe that that is the "standard/normal/original" way to spell it). This may well be another instance of British spelling changing in recent decades in order to fight against perceptions but not realities of a British/American spelling difference.*
Confusion about its spelling is understandable, though, since there is a noun that is more usually spelled/spelt baulk. It's part of a billiard-type game table, and the term is used in several terms in several such games.
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| Illustration from International 8 Ball Referee |
I searched for several of these terms as either balk or baulk in Corpus of Global Web-Based English and got only the u spelling—with none of them in AmE:
(Britannica.com has it as balk. They're owned by the same company as Merriam-Webster. Is the ghost of Noah W. removing U's in the encyclop[a]edia?)
So, in general, if it's a [billiards] noun, it's baulk and if it's a verb it's balk. They both come from the same Old English word, with a Germanic ancestor.
The one other -aulk word in current English is caulk (used much more in AmE than BrE, which tends to say seal/sealant instead)—but that came into English with the u, as it came from French cauquer in the 1500s.
The post-Norman urge to stick a U in balk also affected talk and stalk in the 1600s, but not, apparently walk. For me, the mystery is: why has the urge to stick a U in persisted for baulk and not the others?
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*I say 'another' instance of spelling change due to perceptions of 'Americanism' because I discuss the main instance of that phenomenon in detail in The Prodigal Tongue:
Posts
You mentioned the Guardian style guide, so I searched at the Guardian site to see whether they actually obey it — only to find that they seem to have stopped using ba(u)lk at all. Google finds only two instances on its site since 2013, both balk. Until then, both spellings were in use.
ReplyDeleteIt's a common word in journalism, why did it vanish from the Guardian? It's still in use at the BBC (about equal numbers of hits for balked and baulked) and Telegraph (baulked is taking a strong lead with more than twice as many appearances as balked in the past year).
Thanks for the research!
DeleteIn snooker you also hear "baulk area", "baulk end" or just "the baulk".
ReplyDeleteYes, there's a long list of these things at the link I linked to, but most did not come up in the corpus search.
ReplyDeleteBalk in baseball is an infraction of the rules that prevents a pitcher from deceiving a baserunner through any of many behaviors/contortions. Etymonline.com says rule dates from earliest time of the game of base ball, as it was then spelled.
ReplyDeleteThere's a balk in rugby in the same sense, when the hooker fakes a throw in to a lineout.
DeleteI decided to let my fingers do the movement, and as a BrE native, I seem to follow Lynne's guide that balk as a verb is non-U, I assume baulk as a noun is U.
There's also the noun (not sure if it's a homonym or same word) which I've only ever seen spelt baulk in BrE, namely a baulk of timber, as in a railway sleeper under the track. Any thoughts on that (since I don't have an OED handy to check)?
ReplyDeleteYes, ba(u)lk meaning "roughly squared beam of timber" is the same word, and "beam of wood" is one of the oldest meanings, also found in many Germanic cognates. The OED entry hasn't been updated since 1885; most of their quotations spell that sense without the u, but maybe that's changed since then.
ReplyDeleteThe baulkanization of English continues
ReplyDelete