All of the letters and sounds in the word ask are also in the word aks. When the letters S and K trade places, the word ends up sounding like axe, the woodsman’s sharp-bladed implement for chopping trees. People who say “Axe me” are fortunate that Little Miss Borden isn’t still around to accept their invitation.
Lizzie Borden took an ax, and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one. That’s how the rhyme goes, but Lizzie actually gave maw and paw only 19 and 20 whacks. Only. The coroner said each of her parents were killed by the first blow, but it doesn’t rhyme as nicely.
Axe Me No Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies
Before he was President of the United States, Jimmy Carter learned about nuclear reactor operations at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, the place my father worked in the 1950s.
KAPL was a Niskayuna, NY research facility
Among other things, the scientists there developed the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus. As President, Carter was ridiculed by haters as a hayseed for saying nucular (nook-yoo-lar) instead of the proper pronunciation, nuclear (nook-lee-ar).
The process of moving letters around inside words like that is called metathesis, from the Greek for changing position
I thought axe for ask was relatively new, but it’s not. Geoffrey Chaucer, the guy who was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey’s Poets Corner? He was also a storyteller and he used axe in his Canterbury Tales:
“Yow loveres axe I now this questioun.”
Chaucer’s wasn’t the first recorded use of axe for ask, however. Here it is in Matthew 7:7 of the New Testament:
Axe, and it shalbe geuen you: Seke, and ye shall fynde: Knocke, and it shalbe opened vnto you.
All those underlined words with old-timey spellings evolved into the ones used today by everyone but a relatively few people who say axe when they mean ask.
Axe for ask is the most well-known spoken dialect stereotype
Say axe and most people will assume that you are a poorly-educated person with an African heritage. Hold on, say those who insist that axe isn’t a mispronunciation at all. They claim it’s an alternative version just like potato/pototto and tomato/tomotto. Smithsonian agrees, saying “Axe for ask isn’t wrong, it’s just different.”
Axe (as in pose a question) is said to have been used all along the USA’s eastern seaboard hundreds of years ago before retreating to the Deep South and some of the grittier parts of large cities north of the Mason-Dixon line.
How do people who say axe spell it?
Writing ask but saying axe creates a sort of a mental friction that goes by the name cognitive dissonance in social psychology circles. You and I might call it mixed emotions, uncertainty, or inner conflict. It’s the unease that happens when we’re stuck with two conflicting thoughts fighting amongst themselves. Sort of arm wrestling with yourself.
Cognitive dissonance occurs in everyday situations
You’re getting a dose when you’re nice to people you loathe, every time you say yes when the restaurant manager asks if everything was fine when it wasn’t, or eating a bag of greasy, salty, high-starch potato chips while drinking sugar water when you know better. The famous definition often (incorrectly) attributed to Ronald Reagan was, “Watching your new Cadillac going off the cliff with your mother-in-law in it.”
How did axe become the language of an ethic group?
Axe came to the U.S. and the Caribbean with a crazy quilt of West African languages. The common denominator was the speech, words, and sounds of African slaves. Which is how axe found a foothold in London.
Axe was imported by waves of Caribbean immigrants
After World War Two, the British government calculated that at least a million more workers were needed to help rebuild the nation. Clever folk, they began recruiting workers from the third-world colonies of the former British still favorable to the British throne.
People tend to speak the same way as those in their social group so they’ll fit in
The speech that developed from a mash-up of all those immigrant languages and dialects is a part of what the Brits call Multicultural London English. It’s been described as Jamaican patois married to Cockney speech; young working-class people living in multiethnic neighborhoods and producing a new urban London accent.
For a closer look at how the BBC defines 17 multicultural inner-city London words, click here.
Bonus
The Memphis City School System has long been criticized as being short on good teachers because they’re top-heavy with administrative bloat which sucks away the dollars. Here’s an example:
Decades ago, a friend pulled his daughter out of the Memphis, Tennessee Public School System when she came home one day and announced that her teacher told them they can pronounce the letter R as are or are-uh, both are correct. And that ask and axe are both correct, too.
