Today I was listening to A Way With Words in the car. (Aside: When I was in grad school, this show was insufferable, and I could only hate-listen to it, but now it is quite reasonable.)

One of the callers was asking about her mother’s pronunciation of the word “avocado” as “alvocado.” And the host explained that in some dialects, the “ah” sound at the beginning of avocado is more like an “awe” sound, and that an “awe” sound is starting to get suspiciously close to an l.

And now I am wondering if this explains the comparitive surprise vs. lack of surprise in my household about the spelling of the word gołąbki. I learned how to say the word from people who grew up speaking Polish, and I learned how to say it a really long time before I learned how to spell it. I was really surprised when I learned how to spell it because I would have sworn that there was a w. Apparently stroke-l (or, as my mother calls it, L z kreską ukośną) sounds like a w to me. But Jim was not surprised at all, based on having heard me say the word because in my pronunciation of gołąbki, the ł sounds sort of like an l.

But today, this difference of interpretation of the word became somewhat harmonized when it was revealed that there is only a short distance between “awe” and “oll.”

(Aside: If anyone kvetches to you about the terrible orthography in English and how there is no reasonable mapping between words and their spelling, French and Polish are both pretty bad, too. Did you know that an ą in the middle of a word typically contains an invisible m?)

(Aside 2: You can be pedantic when ordering Polish food. Gołąbki is plural; gołąbek is singular. Likewise, pierogi is plural, and pieróg is singular.)