Billy Joel

Today's topic is Billy Joel and the inconsistent appearance of the New York accent in his music. Billy Joel, being born and raised in New York City, has some New York-ish features in his speech, such as a COT-CAUGHT distinction. Noticeably, his interviews don't seem to show any non-rhoticism.

• The beatles for a l[ɔ]ng time (source)
• Paul McC[ɑɹ]tney specifically, as a melody writ[ɚ] (source)
• Who th[ɔ]ght (source)

On his own music, he tends to use the non-rhotic accent that was typical of working-class New Yorkers. The stressed 'er' vowel, as in 'bird', is always rhotic, but other cases of Vr have the r dropped.

Anthony's Song (Movin' Out)
• "Ah but workin' too h[ɑ]d can give you a h[ɑ]t attack
• S[ɑ]geant O'Leary is walkin' the beat
• At night he becomes a bartend[ə]

"We didn't start the fire"
• M[ɑ]rciano

"Still Rock and Roll To Me"
• What's the matt[ə] with the c[ɑ] I'm driving?

He has some other features typical of New York English in his songs, such as the MARRY-MERRY distinction and using the LOT vowel for words like orange. He avoids using a diphthongized THOUGHT vowel in his music despite using it in his own speech. This suggests to me that some features to him are automatic. He probably doesn't think that the MARRY-MERRY distinction is an 'accent' thing. He is probably aware that the diphthongized THOUGHT vowel is viewed negatively outside of New York. Non-rhoticism seems to walk a middle ground between recognizably New York but not stigmatized, so he plays them up as part of a working-class-but-not-too-working-class New Yorker persona.

• And a bright [ɑ]range pair of pants?
• M[æ]rilyn Monroe
• "H[æ]rry Truman, D[ɑ]ris Day"

A major exception to his non-rhotic vowels is the song "Uptown Girl", where he uses rhoticized vowels basically every chance he gets. This song is an homage to Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons. Frankie uses rhoticized vowels, but he never uses this degree of rhoticism that he does. He is coming in hard and really lengthening the 'errrr' more than he does in his own speech. It's curious to me since he sounds more like a 'downtown boy' with his usual sung accent than he does here, but perhaps he associated exaggerated rhoticism with the music of his youth.

Uptown Girl
• Uptown g[ɚ]l
• I bet h[ɚ] mamma never told her why
• I bet she's nev[ɚ] had a backstreet guy
• She's been living in h[ɚ] white-bread w[ɚ]ld

Solenoid, silenoid, or cellunoid?

I come today with more questions than answers. The English language, it turns out, can support a wide variety of localized pronunciations for the same word, with little clear root as to where they come from and where they go. Today we'll be looking at a car part, the 'solenoid.' A solenoid is a "coil of insulated wire carrying an electrical current and having magnetic properties", which entered the English language in 1827 from French solénoïde (via etymonline). The standard pronunciation is /sɒlənoɪd/, 'soll-uh-noid', but I've found at least two alternative pronunciations.

Passing a current through the solenoid coil creates an electromagnetic field. Image via IQSDirectory.

An example of a red solenoid coil. Image via iFixit.

In the Beach Boys Song "Cherry Cherry Coupe" (1963), Mike Love sings about a car with doors that open with the 'cellunoid' [sɛljʊnoɪd] system. You may wonder how we know that this is supposed to be the same word as 'solenoid', beyond the general consonant contours being the same, and the clue is in the car door description - solenoids were used in technology that made doors 'pop' open without the need for car handles.

Door handles are off but you know I'll never miss 'em
They open when i want with the cellunoid system

We find an early reference to this in Volume 80 of "American Bicyclist and Motorcyclist" (1959). The same device is also advertised in Volume 57 of Playthings, with the same verbiage.

Volumes 31-32 of Gas Appliance Merchandising (1959) mention 'cellunoid valves' as self-evidently recognized car parts.

By the 1980s, the term appears to be falling out of favor. Some of the last references I can find to it are in "Adapting Work Sites for People with Disabilities" (1983).

This 1985 reference seems to be a metaphorical use by a psychotherapy patient (Understanding Human Behavior in Health and Illness.

And this 1998 hit is firmly in the world of literature (Five Fingers Review).

And so it seems that the cellunoid pronunciation and spelling has died out, having seen its peak in the late 50s and early 60s, and descending into obscurity by the 80s and 90s. It's not clear where this alternative pronunciation and spelling came from. It smells of being a trademark to me, but a search through the United States Patent and Trademark Office site didn't turn up any hits in patents or trademark registrations. In fact, trying to do so redirects me to patents and trademarks featuring the word celluloid instead.

Having hit the end of one mystery of history, let's start another. This is the pronunciation "silenoid" [sɪlənoɪd]. At first glance, it looks like a descendant of 'cellunoid'. The y-sound [j] in 'lyu' appears to have been dropped, meaning that the sound change called "yod-dropping" happened. It also looks like the 'eh' [ɛ] sound was raised to short 'ih' [ɪ]. I don't know if there's any sort of documented FELL-FILL merger, but English vowels tend to merge and change before L, as I've written in Pre-L Back Vowel Madness.

Unexpectedly, we have an early citation for 'silenoid' than we do for "cellunoid". The Journal of General Psychology Volumes 35-36 (1946) mentions the 'silenoid'.

Further research on "silenoid" is unfortunately complicated by the fact that "silenoid" is also used to refer to flowering plants from the "Silene" genus. This tantalizingly early example of "silenoid" (1915!) is in fact a reference to carnations (Contributions by the New York Botanical Garden).

While I couldn't find any later recordings of someone using 'cellunoid', I was able to find this pronunciations of "silenoid", thanks to the folks at the Smiley Smile forums: "I did check to see if the silenoids were working."

And a more modern example from Donut Media, with "fuel silenoid and NOS silenoid".