Miracle Whip, Onboarding and the Wonders of the English Language

On a Zoom call recently, someone mentioned the “onboarding” of a new workplace policy. She pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable — “ON-boarding” — even though we pronounce the original expression “on BOARD.” Believe it or not, this got me thinking about mayonnaise.

More specifically, it reminded me of an old radio commercial that has always stuck in my mind for the way, in the last line, the announcer pronounces the name of the product with a subtle emphasis on the last word: “Miracle WHIP.” (He made it sound rather exquisite: “Miracle Whip has such a wonderful flavor — lively and teasing, peppy and yet not a bit too sharp. It’s a flavor that’s just exactly right!”) Today we put the weight on the first word, “MIRACLE Whip.”

If you listen for it, you can hear a similar shift in many different places. A character in a 1930s gangster movie I saw accused another of acting like a “big SHOT.” I distinctly remember a friend excitedly telling me in 1977 that he had just seen a neat new movie called “Star WARS.”

They all follow the same pattern: As names and phrases become familiar, speakers tend to start shifting the emphasis to the front. It happens gradually, but the result can be unmistakable, leaving the original pronunciation to sound odd and dated.

That radio commercial is from 1951, when the condiment was still newer to the market. Initially one referred to it as a kind of whip that was designated a miracle, a miracle WHIP, like a magic CARPET or a silver FLUTE. But many people encounter Miracle Whip more often than magic carpets or silver flutes. As the condiment became familiar to American consumers, the emphasis shifted.

In that same commercial, the announcer calls it a “salad DRESSing” instead of our more common “SALad dressing.” And the same goes for the communication platform that people are today more likely to call “WHATSapp,” rather than “WhatsAPP,” as they did when it first came into wide circulation. The shift happened as the term became commonplace.