It came by again yesterday morning on NPR: a spot for the Portuguese Cork Association, promoting the use of cork for wine bottle stoppers on environmental and sustainability grounds. Even though I hear it almost every day, this time I heard it as “Portuguese Pork Association”, which fascinated me — is there something special about pork from Portugal? how long has the U.S. been importing Portuguese pork? (you learn something new every day!) — until I realized that I’d misheard the thing.
Now /p/ (as in pork) and /k/ (as in cork) are phonetcally very similar, so that it’s easy to confuse them perceptually (and they are good in half-rhymes). In this case, it looks like the initial /por/ of Portuguese got carried over — persevered — in my perception of the /kor/ of cork.
Surprisingly hard for me to shake.
