BigT, your comment makes no sense. The fact that I made the distinction between those vowels should make it obvious that I know about it. I’m from the Bronx, and am quite familiar with the difference between Mary, marry, and merry. I pronounce these words differently, and can hear the distinction when it is made by others. Just because some dialects of English don’t make the distinction doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’m more surprised that JKellyMap doesn’t recognize the distinction, which is a well-known feature of the dialects of the area.
“Heh” and “hai” indicate different vowel sounds, even if some dialects of English merge them. Besides that, the two spellings represent a different syllabification and pronunciation of the last part of the word.
Many of the junkies, I mean substance abusers, I used to deal with referred to it as “hair on”. But then their suppliers drove Alfalfa Romeos and packed nine million meter pistols.
I do not have any form of the Mary-merry-marry merger and grew up in the South and Midwest, but my parents were from the NYC metro area and I may have picked it up from them.
Heroin and heroine, to me, are pronounced exactly alike.
Do you hear a difference between “her on” and the bird, “heron”? If so, that’s the difference between “eh” being ‘r-controlled’ or not. Which is the difference between ‘her - rowin’ and ‘heh - rowin.’
Say this aloud: “her heh her heh her heh.”
Now this: “her-rowin heh-rowin her-rowin heh-rowin.”
The worst thing I’ve ever seen regarding this word was some awful girl on a youtube video claiming that Heroin was called Heroin because “it makes you feel like a hero when you take it”. Seriously. I could not detect any irony in her presentation, and I try to avoid reading the comments underneath any Youtube video, so I’m unsure what the consensus was regarding the sincerity of her comments, but as far as I could make out, she was 100% serious.
Actually, now that I think about how I worded this post, the worst thing I’ve ever seen regarding this word is the documentary “Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict”. I can hand-on-heart say I’ve never seen anything so brutally & painfully real. It should be essential viewing for any drug education class.
It’s on Youtube in it’s entirety here.
Stewie Griffin calls it “hair-o-ween.” I think the joke here is that he is just guessing at how to pronounce it, but I suppose it could be a foreign or archaic pronunciation he picked up somehow.
I looked it up—actually, the title was “Got the Monkey on My Back” by Olive Brown where she sang “HEE-royn.” And that was recorded sometimes in the 1960s, I think.
Along those lines, I believe that’s how it’s pronounced in The Transplant’s Diamonds and Guns (1:40 mark. Lyrics NSFW). I always assumed it was just an artifact of Tim Armstrong’s inability to sing clearly and not actually a thing.
