Kevin Warsh is President Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve. For some people, his last name carries a particular meaning — specifically, the pronunciation. Some say “warshed” instead of “washed.” Patricia T. O’Conner, a language commentator who grew up in Iowa, remembers her grandmother scolding, “Show me your hands … I don’t think you warshed those hands.”
That pronunciation — “warsh” — is part of an American dialect that linguists say is fading. You might also hear it in variants like “Warshington.” Names can be tricky: Paul E. Reed, an associate professor of phonetics and phonology at the University of Alabama, notes Warsh’s name may once have been “Wash or Walsh,” but tracing names is uncertain.
A leading theory traces the extra “r” to the migration of Scotch-Irish settlers into the South Midland United States in the late 18th century. These settlers, who moved from Scotland to Ulster in Northern Ireland before emigrating to America, were strongly rhotic — they pronounced r’s more forcefully. That r-full speech spread across parts of Appalachia and the Midwest: from Baltimore and southern Ohio to Michigan and even Washington state. Robin Dodsworth, a linguistics professor at North Carolina State University, says older speakers in those areas still use the pronunciation, though it’s less common now in the Midlands where it may have originated.
Written evidence of the pronunciation dates to the late 19th century. Philologist Frederick Thomas Elworthy noted dialectal forms in an 1875 paper, and an 1897 poem by James Whitcomb Riley also includes “warshed his hands.”
Why would an r appear in a word without one? Nicole Holliday, an acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, explains that the American English r is rare cross-linguistically and that common, long-lived words are vulnerable to shifts because speakers use them so often that their brains “fill in the gaps.” The insertion of r in wash can be explained by coarticulation: neighboring sounds influence each other. The “sh” at the end of wash affects the vowel before it; lips round for sounds like “wah,” “sh,” and “rrr,” and the tongue’s position during the “sh” can allow an r-like quality to slip in. Reed quotes a phonetician who put it plainly: when you speak, you’re “basically just moving hunks of meat around in the air.” Vowels are “squishy” and subject to such shifts.
Once the pronunciation took hold locally, it was passed down through families. Children who hear “warsh” may even spell it that way at school. Reed uses the term “rootedness” to describe how local pronunciations stick because they’re meaningful and tied to home and family memories — “someone’s aunt or their grandfather or their grandmother,” he says.
The pronunciation endures as part of cultural identity in places like Baltimore. Locals and newcomers alike notice it. Some residents proudly use “warsh” because a parent or grandparent did. The sound appears in popular culture too: John Waters’ films showcase a Baltimore accent; country singer Luke Bryan sings “Start warshin’ all our worries down the drain”; the late Senator John McCain famously said “Warshington.” A Washington Post columnist once received reader comments about the pronunciation.
Still, linguists say the feature is declining. Dodsworth attributes the drop to population mobility rather than social media. Holliday describes language as a living organism that will change over time.
Whatever you call it, the pronunciation tells a story about migration, family, and regional identity — and about how the mechanics of speech can nudge a single sound into a familiar word.