When I use a word: Ough ough (2024)

When I use a word

Cough, pronounced coff, is onomatopoeic in origin, from the sound of the closure of the glottis plus the sound of air whizzing or wheezing through the trachea. Other languages have different ways of mimicking the sound of a cough. The Greek word was βηξ (bex), with its guttural stem βηχ- (bekh-). The Latin word was tussis, with its own form of onomatopoeia, giving modern words like toux (French), tosse (Italian and Portuguese), and toz (Spanish). However, more northerly languages have Husten (German), hoost (Dutch), hoste (Danish), and hosta (Swedish), which sound like a cough without the initial closure of the glottis, more like what we call huffing, as in huffing and puffing (which nowadays means objecting loudly). According to Lewis Carroll, uffish, a nonsense word that he used in Jabberwocky, reflected a state of mind in which “the voice is gruffish, the manner roughish, and the temper huffish.” And among drug users, to huff means to inhale, usually in reference to marihuana.

Coughing and huffing come together in the German word for whooping cough, Keuchhusten. And the half-cough of clearing   the throat to attract attention is called a hem, giving the interjection ahem (compare the French hein). In As You Like It (act 1, scene 3) Rosalind says that there are burs in her heart. “Hem them away,” says Celia.

Prompted by the unusual pronunciation of cough, George Bernard Shaw suggested that ghoti spelt fish—“gh” as in cough, “o” as in women, and “ti” as in nation. But, of course, ough is not always pronounced off, as the table shows.

An American friend has told me that there is a US town called Gough, pronounced “gaff,” but I suspect that this is just “goff” spoken with a strong American accent.

Notice that slough and shough can each be pronounced in three different ways. And the correct way to pronounce the title of this piece is “Oh oh.”

Enough.