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.
If I'm not mistaken, the baseball term is pronounced "balk" and not " bawk" -- I think I heard that in a YouTube video.
DeleteThere'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
ReplyDeleteI appreciate that what I'm about to say is based on the premise of any sort of link between English spelling and pronunciation, but I think that it's still interesting!
ReplyDeleteOne thing you don't mention is the vowel in "baulk" (or "balk"), you're only looking at the orthography. Personally I have "baulk" as /bo͡wk/ (where /o͡w/ is the [w]-closing diphthong in ghoul, all, ball). For what it's worth, it also rhymes with "caulk" for me and not "cork". I think that's pretty common, though it's one of those words where you do expect to hear some variation, being a word where one of those those diphthongs (like "ghoul" and "goal") can arise in places with "l" in the orthography and a historic [l] sound in the pronunciation, whereas other speaker do not have those as separate vowels. Whatever the vowel used, you may or may not hear a /l/ sound after it too from different speakers.
One of the pronunciations I don't expect to hear though is /boːk/, with a THOUGHT vowel. That rings very American to my ear (though perhaps it's more accurately a LOT-THOUGHT vowel for the speakers that I'm hearing as a THOUGHT vowel!). As far as I'm concerned, that is only what dogs do in that faux-baby-talk internet meme speech. Dogs "bork" at cats!
So I'd be interested to know what the actual distribution of pronunciations for "baulk/balk" is, because my sense is that here in the UK, it's more likely to pattern with the same pronunciation the speaker has in words like "haul", "Paul", "caul", "maul" (and so the "baulk" spelling makes a bit more sense). And patterning the pronunciation with "talk", "chalk", "walk", "stalk" is something I expect much more from North American folk (a pronunciation which would tend to suggest the "balk" spelling).
(If my sense is correct and there is such a difference, the follow-up question would of course be one of chicken and egg between spelling and pronunciation!)
Lots of good points—and we must note that I am much more comfortable in talking about spelling than pronunciation, which is the one part of language I've avoided doing in my professional life.
DeleteEnglish spouse and I have just been saying sentences with these words—and 'stalk', and we both get more L-ness in 'stalk' than in 'talk', but differ in our 'caulk'. British people tend to hear my 'caulk' as 'cock' (part of why I say 'sealant' in the UK), though I hear the vowels as different. Spouse's & my 'balk's are very different—his rhymes with his (very back vowel) 'hawk', mine is 'ball' (not so back) with the /l/ and a /k/ on the end. My American balk does not rhyme with my talk, which has no /l/.
But of course, there's going to be huge variety on this. On Youglish, there are Americans whose 'balk' rhymes with 'talk' (the first US one is a poet doing just that), or with more diphthongy pronunciations. Edward Norton—number 11—has more of an /l/, like me.
https://youglish.com/pronounce/balk/english/us
I've had a quick look for this in linguistic atlases online—and what I found was that early linguistic atlases of the US often failed to capture this variation, used as justification for a new project. But I have not (in my 10 minutes) found the results.
We'd usually assume that early spellings are telling us something about pronunciation, since spelling was not so standardized way back when. But I'd also wonder how much we have homophony avoidance in this class, rather than just regular sound change—I feel like I say the L in 'balk' because otherwise I sound like a chicken!
Anyhow, anyone with more access to dialect facts is invited to respond!
There's a line in the song 'Trouble' from 'The Music Man' where Professor Hill says: "It takes judgment, brains, and maturity to score
ReplyDeleteIn a balkline game" It was where I first learned the word.
Do you take requests? Because I have a request. I'll just post it now, save us the trouble of a back and forth.
ReplyDeleteOver the past day, there have been two posts at /r/Englishlearning about basically the same thing, which I'm dubiously deciding might possibly be called the mandative present subjunctive (?) because that's my best guess. Wikipedia suggests it's more common in the US than the UK, which would explain the responses to those two posts.
Well, it'd half explain them - frankly, the number of people who are trying to say that "Because Speaker A said X in the past, Speaker B must say Y in the past as well - grammar!" is exhausting. That can't be how it works in any part of the Anglosphere, I refuse to believe it.
Anyway, opinions? Comments? Help?
I do not take requests via comment. (See comments policy: https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2006/07/comments-policy.html)
DeleteBut this is a topic that is covered in my book, so I can recommend that! https://theprodigaltongue.com/
As a Brit who is a keen player of American(/global) pool, the balk/baulk discussion reminded me of one of my favourite terminology differences between BrE and AmE when talking about billiards games: the area of the table referred to as baulk by Brits is called 'the kitchen' by players of American varieties. The reasoning apparently being that when people starting installing tables in their homes, living rooms weren't all that big so they'd often find themselves having to stand in (or very close to) the kitchen to play the break shot. This doesn't seem to be tremendously well-sourced, but see for example the Wikipedia glossary of pool terms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_cue_sports_terms#K
ReplyDeleteAnother one that I find a lot of fun is that leather tips, which allow for shots with side spin, took off in Britain a good while before they reached the States, and were first popularised in North America by a touring British player. For this reason, the American term for what Brits call 'side spin' is 'english' (note the lower-case 'e').
The OED isn't certain about that etymology. Another possibility they note is quoted from the Times: "1959
DeleteThe billiard term ‘putting on the english’, which Atticus states is current parlance in American bowling circles. The story goes that an enterprising gentleman from these shores travelled to the United States during the latter part of the last century and impressed the Americans with a demonstration of the effect of ‘side’ on pool or billiard balls. His name was English."