Friday, September 27, 2024

I Use Pry for Probably

I realized this morning that one of my speech idiosyncrasies is to use "pry" for "probably" in some circumstances. I know I got this from my mother: when I say it, I can hear it in her voice.

It's hard for me to think of examples when I would use it vs. when I would use the full word, but I it came out of my mouth this morning when I was talking about sharing an object with someone and I said, "I won’t pry use it until the day after..." 

It sounds so country or maybe Middle English or... I don't know what. Quaint, at least.

I couldn't find much discussion of it online. Just a thread on Reddit, where most of the people thought it was a contraction of "prolly." Which seems ridiculous to me, since I never heard that used until the last 20 years.

The people on that thread who use it all seem to come from the Midwest rust belt. My mother was from Oneonta, New York — pretty far from Cleveland and Detroit.

I pry can find some other people who use it if I look hard enough.


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