Onward and upward in my quest to reduce the number of unanswered requests in my e-mail inbox. Some of them I've put off answering because the answers are long and complicated and require actual work. This one is the other kind. I've delayed answering it because I don't have any cute stories to tell about it. (Protests that none of my stories are cute should be written up in triplicate and submitted to your local authority figure.)
It comes from Paul of
The Beer Card. Or, rather, it came from Paul (in March--forgive me!):
I subscribe to Bridge World, an American magazine, that exhorts its readers to 'please patronize our advertisers'. Every time I see this my instinctive reaction is to send them a sarcastic or condescending e-mail. Is this form of the verb less common in the US?
I did notice that Chambers and American Heritage Dictionary give the meanings in reverse order.
Points to Paul for the dictionary research!
Rather than saying that the 'condescend' sense of
patroni{s/z}e is less common in
AmE, I'd venture that the 'give financial support to' sense is more common in
AmE than in
BrE. One reads the
please patronize our advertisers/sponsors admonition often in the newsletters of small
organi{s/z}
ations--charities, churches and the like--whose advertisers are typically small businesses with small advertising budgets. But since
patroni{s/z}e is ambiguous (and probably also because it's a 'hard' word), one more often sees
please support our advertisers/sponsors-- about four times more often with
advertisers and 40 times more often with
sponsors, if we can take the Google results as representative.
Trying to test this out further on Google, one is a bit hampered by the fact that Google doesn't allow for US-only searches. So, the below is a comparison of
patroni{s/z}e our advertisers on the web in general versus the UK:
| UK | World |
| patronise our advertisers | 1 | 24 |
| patronize our advertisers | 1 | 80,700 |
As opposed to
support, which is seen more in the UK.
| UK | World |
| support our advertisers | 12,200 | 323,000 |
In other words, a site that exhorts you to support advertisers has a 3.7% chance of being a UK-based site (at least as far as Google can tell), whereas a site that encourages you to
patroni{s/z}e advertisers has only a .002% chance of being UK-based. So, since
BrE readers are less likely to have come across this use of
patroni{s/z}e regularly, it's more likely to strike them as odd, and to bring up the other possible meaning, as is Paul's experience.
AmE readers, on the other hand, are more
accustomed to relying on the object of the verb (in this case
advertisers/sponsors) to tell them that it's probably the 'financially support' sense and not the 'condescend' sense that's intended. We (all dialects) do that kind of thing all the time. For instance, we know that different senses of
book are at play if a police officer
books a massage therapist or
books a suspect. (Of course, we can overcome those interpretations with more context--the officer could
book a massage therapist for assault or
book a suspect (who happens to be a clown) for his daughter's birthday party. But I just raise this example to defend myself against the hordes who might claim that
AmE is irresponsible for having a verb with two senses. Most verbs have at least that many!)
Postscript, later that evening: Describing this entry to my friend the Poet this evening, I
reali{s/z}ed, of course, that the two senses are not so confusing in speech. For the 'condescend' meaning I (and Better Half, so maybe this is universal) pronounce the first syllable like the word
pat, and for the 'financially support' sense, I pronounce it with the same vowel as in
pay. The
Concise Oxford (what I have at home) only lists the
pat pronunciation.
American Heritage lists both, starting with
pay, but doesn't specify that they go with different senses. Do you have two pronunciations, and are they sense-specific?
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