Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Another find by David Fenton, very different in character from the last one I posted about: jute box ‘juke box’ and related items. From e-mail to a Wurlitzer site, passed on by Fenton:

what, approximately is a 30 year old wurlitzer (45rpm) jute box in excellent cond. with the records worth?

A couple more hits for jute box, and a couple for jute joint ‘juke joint’:

[on auction site] 1954 Wurlitzer Jute Box 1600 series 48 selection 78 records (link)

jute box stamps by Dennis Holmes (link) [there are shirts with juke boxes on them as well]

Often times my father would take me with him to this jute joint called the Sugar Shack where he sometimes moonlighted as a bouncer. (link)

A show woman sings and dances in a jute joint for people while she wears a revealing red flashy dress. (link)

Certainly non-standard, but where might it have come from?

[The Wurltizer word is various spelled solid, hyphenated (as in OED2), or separated (as above), with no difference in meaning.]

Jute box has one lexical element, jute, where another, juke, is standard, so it could be seen as a re-shaping of juke box, in which case it looks sort of eggcornish.

But only sort of. Yes, juke is really frequent only in the combination juke box, though it also occurs in juke joint and juke house, and in plain juke referring to a juke box or a juke joint. But jute is scarcely common either. In eggcorns, less familiar material is generally replaced by more familiar material, but jute box for juke box would go in the wrong direction.

Worse, replacing juke by jute doesn’t produce a result that makes at least a bit more sense than the original, as classic eggcorns do. At best, jute box would be a “demi-eggcorn“.

In this case, I think something quite different is going on, something phonological.

Some background …  Final voiceless stops in American English are often glottalized, especially before consonants (stops, in particular), especially in “close construction” with following material(in the first elements of compounds, in particular). The stops /t/ and /k/ are then often pronounced as phonetically very similar segments, and in fact both [t’] and [k’] not infrequently have [ʔ] as a variant in the relevant contexts.

That is, juke box and a hypothetical jute box are likely to have phonetically very similar realizations, as very short glottalized segments, or indeed identical realizations, as [ʔ]. The way is then open for hearers to identify such a pronunciation of juke as an instance of the element jute (unlikely as this might seem on semantic grounds). These hearers will then reproduce the element as jute in both pronunciation and spelling.

My suggestion is then that the spelling JUTE is an “ear spelling”. It would make a nice small project to search for similar cases. Well, WikiAnswers has been faced with the question “What is pot mark skin?”, with POT MARK for pockmark (which is doubly nice, since it also has “final t/d deletion” in MARK for marked), and there are occurrences of RITSHAW for rickshaw as well, and there may be others out there.

[A side note on juke (also spelled jook or jouk). The word is probably from the American creole Gullah word juke or joog ‘disorderly, wicked’, with an origin in a West African language. OED2’s first cites are in juke-house/juke-joint (in 1935 — Zora Neale Hurston) and in juke-box (in 1937), though earlier uses have probably been found by now.]

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