Hi Marcel

Pinch:Pincer:

Pincher:

I heard someone giving a lecture using it once. Maybe Guo Juan? I don't think it's super-common: my impression is that pincer is used much more frequently.

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To my ear, at least, pinch and pincer can be both verbs and nouns, but pincher is only a noun, and a strange one at that.

More specifically, pincer evokes the military tactic of a pincer movement, where you try and approach the enemy from two sides at once to flank and ideally envelop them.

The alternative I've seen more, though it seems to be mostly in go books from the 70s and such, is "squeeze play". I think this has fallen out of favour.

I have heard pincher occasionally before (maybe by Shygost, I think it tends to be by Americans?) but I don't like it; I use pincer.

Pincer is definitely the right word, but many in the U.S. pronounce it as a homophone of pincher. It's common enough that Merriam Webster lists the pronunciation in their dictionary as a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) note: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pincer

To say "definitely right" about anything in language is to invite a prat fall

We've had this question before, and I'll repeat what I said then: that pinchers is a normal word in Scotland and northern England for pincers (or pliers). I'm at home with either form but tend nowadays to say pincer. However, it's worth noting that we have a verb+noun form of pinch + pincher but there is no pince + pincer, so pincer has to double up as a verb. Nothing wrong with that, but it suggests to me that pinch/pincher was the original form.

But the real reason I'm posting is to ask a question of the US side of the pond. I watched a DVD called Texas Rising last week and was surprised that two American heroes of the time were apparently given the Scottish rendering of their names. One was Deaf Smith, (?) founder of the Texas Rangers and apparently named after his disability, where Deaf was pronounced deef. That was normal for me as a kid (except that it was always 'stone deef', which usually became 'corned beef' - Cockney is not the only dialect to have rhyming slang). The other was Jim Bowie, pronounced boo-ee (i.e the way Americans say buoy, which we render the same as 'boy'). Can you Americans confirm these pronunciations are normal, and if so why? I have actually noticed an awful lot of apparent Scots influence in American speech (gotten is perhaps one, though it may come from other, English, dialects), and some of Webster's spelling such as 'labor' can also be found in Scots.

I live in rural Appalachia. The area was originally population by a lot of Scots and Irish. Some of the vowel sounds you are referring are still present but they are dying out. I also lived for many years in Oklahoma and there is evidence of some of it there. I suspect it is around a lot in the south in general but also dying out due to the influence of mass media. My still-present-although-tempered Yorkshire accent is very different to most people who live around me but perhaps not as far as it is from other places in this country.

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Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

"deef" is likely a southern, or more specifically Texan pronunciation, and probably more restricted to country/uneducated/hillbilly. I'd say its not common, but easily recognized and understood.

boo-ee sounds right to my Texan ears. I've heard it both ways.

Absolutely normal in the 19th century US, and not just in the hills and the South. (Many US emigres to Texas were from Tennessee, who wished to found a new land for slavery, even though Mexico had outlawed it.) When I studied a little linguistics in college, back before they had a major in it, I learned a couple of relevant things. One is that transplanted languages often change more slowly than they do at home. That is why, for instance, Japanese is a better introduction, I was told by a prof, to ancient Chinese than is modern Chinese. Another is that the closest modern pronunciation to Shakespearean English was at that time in the hills of Tennessee. Shakespeare with a twang. I love it!

I have a Scotch Irish heritage, but I grew up in the lowlands, on the border between the twang and the drawl. My mother's mother called her mother mither. She also called a skillet a spider. It was rare where I lived, but there were people around who pronounced, "Are you deaf?", Air ye deef? The family across the street said ye instead of you.

Edit: You mentioned Webster's. When I was little I sometimes sat at table on a very thick copy of Webster's 1840 dictionary, which belonged to my aforementioned grandmother. When I was in high school I had a lot of fun browsing through it. It contained a number of spellings which have since disappeared.

Edit: BTW, the Scotch Irish immigration to America was not the first wave. When they arrived, they found the coastal areas already inhabited by the English, with the Roundheads largely in the North and the Cavaliers largely in the South. That's why they headed for the hills.

Edit: Where I live now, in the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a MacBeeth's Lumber Company. I wonder how Shakespeare pronounced the name?

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Bill: The acknowledged expert seems to be an English linguistics professor, David Crystal. Look at the site below and you may see a kindred spirit

http://originalpronunciation.com/

Elsewhere he has not only given the pronunciation of Macbeth as the modern one, but has it rhyming in the play with 'heath' - 'heath' being pronounced 'heth' though! He does make the point that there was often more than one original pronunciation, and it's far from certain that Shakespeare ever heard a Scots pronunciation of Macbeth (let alone a Gaelic one). However, in Scotland today the two spellings Macbeth and Macbeath go side by side, and there is also MacBeith. Can't say I've actually heard it said macbeeth, but it would be well within the normal variation of 'e' sounds in Gaelic, which is of course pronounced Gallic (Gay-lick is Irish Gaelic). Or should I have said 'the Gallic'?

Lang may yer lum reek!

When I first met the term I assumed pincer as in pincer attack, having played enough wargames when younger for this to feel like natural usage to me. Pincher I'd heard growing up, uncommon but used for the same purpose as John heard it used for. I wouldn't substitute pincher for pincer myself but if someone used it I wouldn't be confused by it. I don't think it would have been confusing for me if I'd been introduced to "squeeze plays," "pinch plays" and "pincher stones" from day one either, they seem like natural enough terms. Pincer seems to be the most common usage if someone wants to avoid ambiguity though.

I love those silly statements by English profs (I remember one form my own days in uni who argued that Shakespeare wouldn't have heard Welsh and that that when it just says "speaks in Welsh" or "speaks in French" would have been gibberish << rather than in my opinion, in the indicted language but non-sequitor for an extra laugh from those in the crowd who DID know those languages.

London of Shakespeare's day was a reasonably cosmopolitan place, a busy port. He would have had the opportunity to have heard many languages. That didn't mean he would know them (to understand) but enough to recognize several by sound. So would his audience.

It reminder me of this video.