No, but I’ve heard fellow Americans state they have “hurt my show-der”.
I think it must be the Aussie accent to your ear, because there is most definitely an ‘l’ in his pronunciation. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of it being pronounced differently. It is definitely soul-dering in Australia. If someone talked to me about ‘soddering’ something I would have no idea what they were talking about.
Yeah; I suppose I should say that it sounds nothing like if an American were to say “sold-er”. The word “sold” has a strong “l” sound in most accents here and doesn’t get slurred away the way it seems to with an Aussie accent (to my ears).
At any rate, it’s very difficult to get this stuff right since it’s so context dependent. Two identical sounds, spoken by people with different accents, can sound like totally different words because of different expectations.
I suspect that you would actually have zero problem understanding an American talking about “soddering”; first, because an American wouldn’t pronounce “soddering” the way an Australian would; and second, because it would be spoken in a context where the meaning would be obvious. I also suspect that if you took an Aussie’s pronunciation and dubbed on top of an American talking about electronics stuff, hardly anyone would be the wiser.
Of on the tangent - has no one seen a pre-electric (or gas) soldering iron? They were massive hunks of metal on a skinny (and long) rod with a thick wooden handle - you put the iron in or near the small fire in the shop - maybe have multiple irons, so one is always at working temperature.
Not hard to imagine the Romans having similar tools - they knew enough to blend lead and tin and make the standard solder used - the 'mercans got scared of lead in their drinking water, so copper pipes for potable water now specify lead-free solder (which is crap).
I suspect the 50/50 tin/lead solder remains the standard for everything else.
For the linguists:
Raised until 12 (which pretty much locks in language, I’m guessing) in Dayton. Moved to S. IN at 12 and heard the hicks butcher the language for the next 6 years.
“Sodder” comes close than “Sauder”, though both are interchangeable to my ear.
One parent from SW OH, other from Central OH - both raised on postage-stamp farms in the middle of nowhere. Mother’s closest girlfriend had “P.O. Box 2” in the nearest town.
Cannot imaging living in such a place.
I’ve seen descriptions of that technique, but then as now it can lead to cold joints. Pouring hot lead is still used to close iron drain pipes, but it’s poured over packed oakum or other sealing materials. I don’t know when blow torches were invented but I imagine you’d have to heat the ends of water supply pipes in a fire before applying molten lead to get a good seal before then.
Ireland: SOLL-der
For what it’s worth, the OED (“the pronunciations given are those in use among educated urban speakers of standard English in Britain and the United States”) gives two pronunciations, one with ‘l’ and one without, but they also have different vowel sounds: SOLL-der and SOAD-er.
Nitpick: GBS was not an Englishman. He made rather a point of not being English.
Yep, no wiggle room, we say soul-da. I only knew about the l dropping when hearing Joe Garrelli say on NewsRadio.
India. Solder.
because they want people to think you’re doing landscaping.
They either used the large metal soldering irons already mentioned, or else they used blowpipes or furnaces.
By the same token, it really behooves us to avoid saying, “I don’t pronounce the L,” because that implies that spelling drives pronunciation. It’s not like people learn how to speak a word entirely from print, but then for some perverse reason decide “not to pronounce” one of the letters.
Of course no pronunciation is better than any other (and in terms of superfluous letters, we probably have more in Brit english thanks to colour and the like)
But a “soddering iron” still sounds painful
I forgot to say - South African, solder
Apropos of nothing in particular, I bet you can’t say “The soldier’s shoulder surgeon” ten times in a row really fast.
It may be relevant that the syllable “sod” really does not carry the same connotations in the USA as it does in the UK, where it (and the derived “sodding”) is a commonly used obscenity, with the literal meaning of one who indulges in sodomy. Most British people would probably find the name of this US company, for instance, hilarious, and they are probably going to think of anal sex long before they think of grass (let alone molten metal), when they hear the syllable. A soddering iron, sounds like it could be a particularly nasty sort of sex toy.
Used as a swear, I’ll bet, for your average Brit, “sod” doesn’t carry any mental associations with anal sex, any more than “bloody” does with Catholicism or “what the fuck” does with actual sex. “Soddering” just sounds rude because sod’s a swearword, not the origin.
Singapore, solder with the L.
I think most of us know, and, as I said, would probably associate it with anal sex before grass. But, whatever, it is still a swear word in Britain, but not (or certainly not commonly) in America, which is the point.
I’m still amused by Americans pronouncing “puma” as “poomer” - once I got over my bewilderment over what the heck a “poomer” is.
In that case, I have been saying it wrong all my life. For me it rhymes with “older” and “bolder”. When I get back to Dublin I’ll ask some of my colleagues how they pronounce it, just to satisfy my own curiosity.
Incidentally, I own (but have never used) one of the old-style soldering irons described above. It belonged to my grandfather.