In A History of Violence, Richie keeps calling Joey “broheem.” The two men are brothers so I assume it is some kind of word for brother, like “bro” or whatever. But I’ve never, ever heard it before, or even heard about people saying it, for that matter. Is this some kind of slang word invented for the movie, or do people actually use it?
never heard of “broheem”, although my brother and I actually did invent a slang term to refer to each other, ‘brudamin.’ I’ll leave it to you smart dopers to work out what phrase it was more or less a phonetic variant of.
A quick googling suggests it’s music/sports/hip hop talk, earliest hit dating to 2000. urbandictionary.com has no definition, so it’s probably been a pretty low-flying term.
It’s also the name of a pro wrestler, a saxophonist, and an anglicized pronunciation of Ibrahim (Abraham).
It’s broheim.
Naw. Broheim would rhyme with crime or slime. Somebody doesn’t know from orthography (and don’t try looking that up at urbandictionary.com).
Unless people (mis)pronounced it bro-heem. Which they do.
Except that the pronunciation undoubtedly came first; the orthography most likely came after. I also disagree with the “eim” spelling.
I always assumed that it would be spelled “brojim” or “brohim”–that it was “bro” with a Latin or Arabic/Muslim inflection.
You know, like “Rahim.”
Not necessarily considering the inspiration for the question. It’s entirely possible that no one connected with the production thought, “Hey, maybe we better figure out exactly how this word’s pronounced.” Supposedly, the pronounciation of medical terms on MASH** gives anyone with a medical background fits. Certainly, I’ve seen large budget films where actors mispronounce words that their characters should have known how to say perfectly. And they supposedly didn’t bother to coach Reagan when he was President before one of his speeches and he misspronounced “paradigm” on national TV.
How did he say it?
Supposedly, (I can’t remember where I read this, other than it was a fairly slanted source, so it might be wholly inaccurate) he said it “paradeegym.”
What production?
Did you miss the part of the OP where it says, “In A History of Violence,” which is a movie currently playing in theaters, and the OP is wondering about the word used in the film?
Dude, I’ve heard the word IRL, plenty of times. The word was a familiar word to me when I saw THoV, and I had already developed a theory as to its origin and spelling, although it never interested me enough to research it. My assumptions in that regard have nothing to do with the context of the film, in other words.
Google says:
brohim: 648 hits
broheem: 857 hits
broheim: 1,580 hits
brojim: 27,800 hits
(No context noted.)
Narrow the search on brojim to English sites only and the count drops to 2,140; most of those are either still not in English or are usernames on message boards, in which case it’s mostly as BroJim, which I’d imagine is pronounced “bro Jim” and is unrelated to the word we’re after.
Yes, I saw that. I’m bewildered at why “broheim” outnumbers “broheem,” because that’s not the pronunciation. But so be it; dictionaries are frequently wrong.
English-speakers pronounce stein as “steen” all the time (especially when it’s part of a name), so it’s not terribly shocking that broheim gets the same treatment. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it pronounced both ways; I’ve no idea which came first.
I think mostly they pronounce it “stein.” “Steen” is the exception.
Just because you’re familar with the word, doesn’t mean anything, unless you’re involved with the production. I’d certainly never heard it before and there’s no way we can say if any of the cast members are familiar with the term unless there’s an interview with them discussing the word or they used it in another film.