Word: haff
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Dates: during 1877-1877
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...poor and uneducated, considering the few opportunities for improvement, slovenly and vulgar pronunciation is to be expected; but the fact that men of three or four years' standing in a respectable college, who, sublimely ignoring dictionaries and the examples of all trustworthy authorities, will persist in calling half haff, and calf caff, shows both gross negligence in an important particular and godlike confidence in their own self-sufficiency...
...rule, to the vowel o, manifest a decided aversion to the broad a (as in father), with an inclination to make the r painfully distinct. Untrammelled by dictionaries, both pronounce such words as aunt, haunt, daunt, cant, etc., ant, hant, dant, cant, while half and laugh are emasculated into haff and laff. Iron, which authority allows us to charitably call iurn, is contorted into the unnecessarily painful irrun. The South, notwithstanding its fondness for calling party pawty, manages by some inscrutable means to satisfy its orthoepical conscience in mutilating palm, calm, psalm into pam, cam, psam, and beer, tear, steer...
...last, etc., invariably parst, farst, larst, only the r is not distinct. Whether he is right in saying demand, command, castle, example, I won't undertake to decide; he certainly has much authority on his side. Perhaps, however, the safest way to shun the extremities represented by the Western haff and laff and the Yankee's parst and larst is to follow the medio tutissimus ibis rule of Ovid...