I hear the difference and I use both pronunciations. I think I use them differently based on context: "the porridge was mushy (tushie) and gross, "that’s a mushy (plush) concept. Don’t know where I got this or why I do it, and I’ve never thought of it until now. I can say that as a Canadian on the west coast, I always heard it as “mushy/plush” until 1) I took up with a woman from West Virginian who pronounced it mushy/tushie in all contexts and 2) lived in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where mushy/tushie was more common, notably in “let’s go to Bridgette’s for a beer (pronounced “bear”) and chips and gravy and mushy peas.”
Option 2 is mooshy and it’s a different word than option 1 mushy.
That’s fine, but if you make a statement like that, it helps to clarify what the difference is, as we don’t all know.
Option 2, for something (normally food) that is wet and soft, eg, liquidised boiled peas.
But, “mushe” is a very common word in chiShona, the predominant language in Zimbabwe where I grew up, meaning “I am fine”, used as the answer to “How are you?” in either English or chiShona ( “Kanjani?”) which is pronounced as option 1, and that was my instictive reading of the word.
The denotation is the same but mooshy (or if mushy is pronounced mooshy) is more humorous or childlike.
BTW this is a poll, and this is IMHO, so that is MHO.
Oh, I understand it as an opinion. I was just curious what – to you – the difference was, as it was tantalizingly left absent and I couldn’t even begin to guess what the difference might be. So one pronunciation is more baby-talk/cutesy; I can dig it.
Not to Scots: mushy peas is very much pronounced “mooshy” in all the Scots accents I have heard. And that probably goes for much of England too.
First, that summary was just in regards to @CookingWithGas ’s personal distinction, not a summary of English dialects in general. I wanted to know what their distinction was, since they didn’t originally explain it.
We’ve also established much of Northern England pronounces it as “mooshy” in this thread, assuming the “oo” in “mushy” is like the “oo” in “look” and not in “moo” as in “moon.” Or are we saying they are pronounced as /u/ in Scots. If so, that’s a third pronunciation. All are valid — I just don’t know if that specific one, and the dialect map doesn’t have it
ETA: actually, sorry. It looks like parts of Scotland and Ireland the vowel can go towards /u/, so that is yet another pronunciation to take note of:
California native older millennial here. I can’t say for certain I’ve ever used the word “mushy” to describe texture. In the late '90s/early '00s, I recall using it in a figurative sense to mean “overly sentimental,” like a Hallmark card or a made-for-TV Christmas movie. I pronounced it such that it rhymed with “pushy.” These days when I read “Goodnight Moon” to my niece, I obviously rhyme the bowl of mush with the old woman whispering “hush.”
I think that sentence is very confusing. Pretty much anyone in the UK seeing the word “mooshy” would interpret that as requiring the same vowel sound as “moon” and that is not as common as some seem to think.
I’m from the north east, my dad’s family is from the north west, and, just for the win,he ran a chip shop for many,many years that sold mushy peas.
By far the most common pronunciation of “mushy” I came across up north has a short “u” sound, as in “hush”. It is no good talking about the “oo” in look as being the same sound as it isn’t necessarily so.
Many of those self-same people would pronounce “mushy” with the short u and “look” with the same vowel sound as “moon”
Many of those self-same people would pronounce “mushy” with the short u and “look” with the same vowel sound as “moon”
Once again, demonstrating why IPA is so helpful in these conversations, and why I’ve been trying to use IPA where I can. I didn’t in that post because IPA irritates some people, but when I say “as in moon” I mean the /u/ sound (or /u:/ sound.) So we’re talking about the differences between /ʌ/, /ʊ/, and /u/. And, you are absolutely right, YOUR “moon” or someone else’s “moon” may not be the same as MY “moon” or “moo”. But /u/ is /u/ if you’re American, British, or Hungarian. (Though a particular IPA sound may not necessarily exist in your language or dialect.)
For me, the ambiguity is I have no idea what people are trying to say when they say they pronounce the word as “mooshy”? Is the vowel there a /ʊ/? Is it a /u/? (“oo” has two distinct pronunciations in my dialects, /ʊ/ and /u/ as in “book” and “moon” – they may exactly the same in other dialects, but American English has two different OO sounds.) Is it something completely different? MY inclination in MY dialect is to say it with an /u:/. Is that what the poster meant? Or did the poster mean /ʊ/ ? When you say “look” has the same vowel as “moon” with some speakers, do you mean both have /u:/ or both have /ʊ/? I can’t tell. I’m guessing /ʊ/, but I don’t know.
Seriously, I havn’t seen the better use of technology till now
where peoples are texting the things which are to be speak
and now i am expecting more entertainment in this community
I replied both, but not because they sound the same to me. I think I’ve said it both ways.
Depends on the context. Wet show is m-uh-shy. An old banana is m-oo-shy.
Sure, but ultimately we are stuck with most people not knowing IPA and IPA itself still needs reference to a sound that people can hear. Without that, it is meaningless.
neither of which is explicable without reference to a sound.
I went with “rhymes with slushie” but then I realized, if I am using it as a verb, I’m likely to rhyme with “push”. As in, “I’m gonna moosh all this stuff together to make a meatloaf. Meatloaf is basically a mush of meat and other stuff”.
People can’t possibly pronounce mushy with the oo of look unless there’s some alien pronunciation of look I’ve been fortunate to have been sheltered from thus far.
They really do in most of England and Scotland.
I personally pronounce “look” so that it rhymes precisely with “luck” or “buck” or “book”. They are all indistinguishable vowel sounds. The exact same vowel sound is what I use for “mushy” as well.
As others have said, it is very common in many parts of the UK.
Other pronunciations of those words are used in the UK and aren’t in any way unusual either.
However, saying “mushy” in such a way that it rhymes with the “moo” of a cow is probably a very niche way of speaking, but again, not unknown.