It's 'Voila' not walaa!

[Hullobaby]

This drives me bonkers! Why the hell do people keep writing walaa when it's voila!

What an unbelievably ignorant comment.

Toe - it comes from having to stand along a line on the floor in school years ago.

It's understandable in that case but come on, for the majority of people making these errors English is their mother tongue.

Some idiot football commentator on Sky Sports said he was given "short thrift" by a club manager 🙈🙊🤷‍♀️

I think its even more patronising to suggest that some people are just incapable of looking up a word or being interested in its etymology...If I am unsure of something, I look it up rather than ignorantly assuming others can work out what I'm getting at.

Yes! Master chef have just started to say it without the “itso” but that’s been a long time coming.

my husband foxes people in bars by saying es - trey-a. Then has to do, es -trell- a.

where do we stand on moet? I’ve just found out it’s mo-et with a hard t not moh-ey.

@Mitfordian

Absolutely one article does not a fact make. But it is part of a wider discussion that's been going on since at least the 1970s and Ebonics in the US.

The tendency to want to standardise English has been going on for hundreds of years. But it's the implicit snide racism that is present when people sneer at the use of words such as Aks or Ax, which has a legitimate grammatical heritage, that I take umbrage with.

It really annoys me, but I sort of get it. Not everybody is educated to the same standard and if somebody has only heard something and doesn't know that it is a foreign word and how it is spelt I can kind of understand how they can think it might be 'walaa ' (shudders). One of my children came with us to visit friends in Wales when they were about 7. The family we visited had quite strong Welsh accents, and when we were leaving there were a lot of people chorusing 'so long', meaning goodbye. It's not a phrase we use, or one she would ever have heard, so that, together with the strong Welsh accent, meant that she thought they were saying 'sa laaa'. Being a very polite child she replied 'sa laaa', which caused much confusion!

Bone apple tea and flaming yawn are my favourite.

Here here! 🤭

OP, how do you feel about using accents correctly... because it's voilà
voi = look, derived from voire = to look
là = there

'la' without the accent = the (feminine article)

But I appreciate it's the English spelling of a French word! I pronounce it the French way - vwah-lah.
The entirely unrelated Arabic "I swear to god" is وَٱللّٰه (literally 'by god') and is pronounced w'allah.

Now off to listen to France's Eurovision 2021 contestant, Barbara Pravi - Voilà...

I rather enjoyed once reading about someone approaching a task "like a bowl in a china shop"

@LadyOfTheCanyon I'm fully aware of the debate and its very similar to that around regional language specifics/dialects.

I personally feel that standardisation can exist alongside regional/cultural variation but that standard English should be taught to all and encouraged in written English. I think this is generally accepted, if not just for the purpose of clear expression. If you are unable to express yourself clearly, you put yourself at an immediate disadvantage. Just because some people see 'aks' as incorrect and point it out, doesn't mean they are snide or racist, they just don't recognise it as standard English, which it isn't.

My point was that @dementedpixie said it was spelt that way because it was pronounced that way, which is ridiculous

I have a colleague who regularly refers to any issue as being a mind-field

I was thinking it's more like يلا sort of yalla, or let's go.

The greengrocer I worked for when I was 16 called them 'man-get-outs'. He really did. I thought it was really quite dear, so I never corrected him (was studying French A-level at the time)

Genuine question out of curiosity - what is the grammatical heritage of aks? I'll have a look at the linked article but I'm sure someone can explain succinctly and conversation/debate is more interesting.

I think language is fascinating and I love how it evolves. Agreed though that a lot of these examples are plain daft.

Where I live people say 'it didn't fizz on him' or 'he wasn't fizzed' when they mean phased. It baffled me when I first heard it. It has taken on a life of its own though and seems pretty much accepted. Hopefully it won't spread!

🤣🤣🤣

Heart rendering (instead of heart rending) ....

I can generally accept most as people hear things via different accents and dialects, and I think I’m a shit speller so who am I to correct others, but I absolutely hate sicastic in stead of sarcastic. My narcissistic mother use to say it all the time and grates on me so much.

Yalla / يلا is definitely a different word altogether! People seem to be mentioning the other one mostly so thought I'd clarify :)

Walaa cracks me up too!!

I assumed it began ironically and has caught on.

I’m a completely nerdy proof reader/linguist and do find written errors jarring. Can’t help it, they just jump out at me.

But with spoken language it’s completely different, and many of the examples in this thread just make me laugh, whether they’re deliberate or not.

Mixing French words and phrases into English has long been used for comic effect, I think - either by Del Boy accent or the other extreme of perfect French pronunciation to make speaker look affected.

We play around with that a lot at home

😆