WOODER, WATER EVERYWHERE

Sue Crane knows what people — in this case The Inquirer — are getting at when they ask her to pronounce certain words, such as w-a-t-e-r.

“Wooder bill, wooder ice, wait an hour before you go in the wooder after you eat, it's always been wooder,” said Crane, 62.

(Though recently you've probably heard the word in the context of “woodergate" as people wondered whether a Bucks County chemical spill threatened the quality of their tap wooder.)

The affable Crane was born and raised in the Northeast along the Tacony and Mayfair neighborhoods. Even a good-hearted attempt at pronouncing it WAH-ter comes out stilted, messing up a cadence that usually ebbs and flows in speed, cramming a series of words in one breath on occasion. It doesn’t even sound normal, she said.

Josef Fruehwald, an assistant linguistics professor at the University of Kentucky, has spent years studying the way people like Crane talk. Growing up in Northeast Philly, he never gave the origins of wooder much thought until after he published a 2013 paper about changes in the Philadelphia dialect with famed University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov. Wooder was a curiosity scholars and reporters often asked about.

“Philadelphians say wooder, and that’s that,” Fruehwald remembers telling a local news outlet at the time.

Wooder has become as synonymous to Philadelphia as the city’s dedication to the Iggles or a loved one asking “Jeet?” The word has come to capture the confounding mechanics of the local accent, which is notoriously difficult to imitate, hard as Hollywood producers might try.

Finally, wooder wore Fruehwald down.

Through research, he hoped to finally explain how many Philadelphians, himself included, came to say wooder, while pinpointing when the word got the phonetic spelling so popular on tchotchkes and T-shirts.

“Growing up, I don't remember seeing wooder spelled out that way, like it is now,” he said.

What’s more, Philadelphians will be the first to tell you wooder is not universal, the affect is as parochial as your favorite corner store hoagie.

Using news archives and recordings of people born as early as the 1890s, Fruehwald learned a bit more about how wooder entered the Philly dialect. He presented his findings at the American Dialect Society earlier this year.

Wooder: A century in the making

Changes in pronunciation are slow, said Fruehwald. By the time people are spelling those changes out, it’s likely been a while. Wooder is no different.

“It was a process that started for people who were born around 1900, 1910 and then progressed as a change,” said Fruehwald.

In Philly, it's possible one of the first phonetic spellings of “wooder” appeared courtesy of Inquirer columnist Clark DeLeon in 1981. Usage of the spelling increased in the aughts, with a spike around 2015. Today “wooder” is widely accepted as a signal of Philly authenticity, embraced by mascot Gritty and featured on Saturday Night Live.

How wooder seeped into public view

Linguists, look away! Here are the least technical ways to explain two of Fruehwald’s theories.

As the pronunciation of lower-positioned vowels in words such as coffee, lost, talk slowly changed to the higher-positioned vowels in cawfee, lawst, and tawk, Fruewald said other vowel sounds might have been affected.

As other vowel sounds changed, it’s possible water “swapped sounds” with the “oo” sound found in foot. But Fruehwald doesn’t like this possibility as a wooder origin story because plenty of words with a similar structure — think waltz, walk, walnut, wall — didn’t adopt that “oo” sound.

The second prospect has a few more steps but follows “sound changes and variation and pronunciation that are already in Philadelphia” of the 20th century, said Fruehwald. It’s possible Philadelphians started adding Rs in the middle of water, which gave the word more of an “oo” sound; think something like worder.

Then the extemporaneous R was dropped, which happens often in linguistics — Fruehwald points to Swarthmore and how the first R (that belongs there) was dropped.

In the case of worder, it’s possible the R was dropped but the “oo” sound remained.

Yet to truly solve the wooder mystery, Fruehwald needs to study words like quarter, corner, daughter, and order to see if they have similarities. He hasn’t done that yet.

Accent? Who cares?

While it may be fun to study the Philly accent through the decades, there’s a reason why linguists study dialects and it boils down to what they call linguistic discrimination.

“It's often used as a stand-in for other discrimination that people don't feel comfortable saying out loud — so like age, so like gender, so like race,” said Fruehwald. “It's hardly ever something about the actual fact of how a word sounds or how a sentence is said.”

Consider how in 1983 New York Times magazine’s WIlliam Safire described the Philadelphia dialect as “a patois so incomprehensible” in his weekly column on language. Or how there are countless Reddit threads and articles on how women are ruining language — as if! — by using “upspeak” or exhibiting vocal fry. Clearly, there's no pleasing youse.

Fruehwald said there’s no good or bad way of speaking, and his work showcases how language is constantly changing, even in Philly.

Wooder, waughter, worder everywhere, nor any drop to drink

With limited linguistic training — and nostalgia for an accent we didn’t know was changing in real time — The Inquirer asked readers to introduce us to residents with quintessential Philly twangs and rhythms. You did not disappoint.

We were met with swift recommendations and volunteers of all ages from across the city, ready to invite us to their homes and places of work, taking our calls and stopping in the middle of the street.

Often, our interview subjects didn’t even have to pronounce w-a-t-e-r or the list of words we picked to highlight the accent, such as shore, phone, and home.

The toughness, and what can only be characterized as swagger, from their, “Hello, howreya?” were enough to hint whether they grew up north or south of Market Street.

“A 100%, it’s definitely a neighborhood thing,” said Crane going through the various drawls in different corners of the city.

We’ll be the first to admit we don’t have the ear to tell Port Richmond from an Oxford Circle accent.

People told us how they learned they had an accent. It almost always involved leaving the neighborhood and someone else pointing it out — for Bill Graham, 76, it happened during his military training. Sometimes people weren’t kind with their observations.

Most listed their parents as the source of their accents, an inheritance they never gave much thought to.

Sister Mary Scullion, cofounder of Project HOME, said her parents had an Irish accent, meaning hers likely came from growing up in Oxford Circle.

Michelle Fiedler, 54, told us about how her accent can lead to some comedic moments. Going to New Orleans means Fiedler has to gesture for things such as wooder because wait staff will often think she’s ready to order.

“If I'm walking down the street and I'm trying to do a voice text with my iPhone, it just comes out as this gibberish,” she said with a laugh. “It doesn't understand me at all.”

Residents like Crane said they were noticing a shift, the accents of neighborhoods starting to sound more neutral.

“Everything is changing in Philly… so we’re getting new accents,” she said, pointing to new construction and jobs attracting newcomers, which she welcomes for the city.

Does that mean wooder is going away? Fruehwald said it’s hard to tell. Just like you’d notice differences in the Philly accent if you listened to recordings from 1950 and 2000, you’d probably notice a difference to recordings from today. The linguist likens language change to weather forecasting. It gets hazier the further out you look into the future. More data is required to confirm local suspicions.

Still, for all the teasing and mishaps, not one person we talked to said they’d change how they or their neighbors across town talked. For people like Graham, linguistic evolution sounds fine, so long as the entire city doesn’t start to pronounce it WAH-ter.

“Wooder is part of Philadelphia and if that goes away, we'll be just like everybody else saying the word correctly,” he said. “It'll take all the fun out of it.”