Voilà vs. Walla

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John from Richmond, Indiana.

Hi, John. Welcome.

Hey, John. What’s going on?

Not a lot.

Richmond.

Thank you so much for having me.

How can we help, John?

My daughter brought home a note from her kindergarten that was trying to use the word voila, the French word.

And what they had actually done was kind of written it in poor phonetic English.

W-A-L-L-A or something similar.

So voila with a W.

Oh, really?

You know, it was from a part-time art teacher who was a college student.

My wife talked me down from saying anything.

How high up were you?

Not too bad.

More of a, boy, this seems odd.

And not too long later, I was reading an article on the web and the exact same thing.

Except this time it was by an author who claimed to have written six books and was a serial entrepreneur, and I figured he had enough life experience to know better.

So I just wanted to know, I have never, I can’t remember having seen this before.

It’s a super hard thing to Google, thanks to Walla Walla Washington.

So I was wondering if this is, like, is it becoming acceptable?

No.

No, not really.

No, no, no.

It’s very explainable, but not at all acceptable.

Okay.

That makes me feel a little bit better.

We’re up on the roof with you now.

Okay.

I’ve been meaning to try this human kite out.

Come along.

Yeah, it is hard to search for if you do Walla Walla.

Just use that minus sign in front of your quoted Walla Walla, and you’ll get a little further.

One of the things that you’ll find if you Google this is a great discussion on Language Log,

Which is the venerable and much respected group blog.

Some of the world’s best linguists and language people get together

And talk about what’s happening in language today.

You’ll also find this pop-up in numerous style guides and reference works.

And in short, what they all say is that this is a spelling error

Because people are approximating what they think the word is.

They don’t quite realize that it’s a borrowed word

And that it should follow French orthography and not English orthography.

And what’s contributing is they think it’s just that they behave as if it’s just an interjection like ta-da or like huh.

Right.

Like that where you can kind of fool around a little bit with the spelling and it’s okay because it’s not actually a word so much as an utterance.

They don’t realize that it’s French for there it is.

Yeah.

See there.

See there.

Literally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And, you know, one of the reasons I wasn’t super high up on my horse was as I was mentally composing my question,

I realized I never spell it right because I don’t put the accent on the A.

Oh, well, you’re not like the people who write me so many times, and they say,

And you do this, and you do this, and viola!

I’m not kidding. I have gotten that so many times. I kind of like it.

Viola. Trombone.

I would blame autocorrect on some of those violas.

Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.

And in English, you don’t have to use the accent mark.

It’s a nice thing to add it, but we don’t have them in English.

And voila is close to a perfectly borrowed word where it has lost a great deal of its Frenchness.

It’s like lingerie and perfume.

Those are almost American now, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, but it’s not spelled like walla walla.

No, it’s V-O-I-L-A with a grave accent on the A from the upper left to the lower right.

Right?

Yes, that is what I’ve seen.

One of the two possible accents that an A might ordinarily take.

Yeah, the law.

Just check your dictionary.

It’s V-O-I-L-A.

Easy.

John, we are up on the high horse with you.

Giddy up.

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah, sure.

Take care.

Okay, au revoir.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Bye.

Bye.

What are you on your high horse about?

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