When President Trump’s Fed nominee Kevin Warsh made headlines, so did the way his surname is pronounced. For some speakers, ‘wash’ becomes ‘warsh’ — and even ‘warshed’ shows up as a past tense. Language commentator Patricia T. O’Conner, who grew up in Iowa, remembers her grandmother admonishing, ‘Show me your hands … I don’t think you warshed those hands.’
That r‑insertion is a feature of an American regional dialect that linguists say is shrinking. The variant appears in pockets across the country, sometimes showing up in names as well: Paul E. Reed, an associate professor of phonetics and phonology at the University of Alabama, observes that the surname Warsh may once have been Wash or Walsh, but name histories are often hard to pin down.
A common explanation links the extra r to Scotch‑Irish settlers who moved through the South Midland United States in the late 18th century. These communities tended to be strongly rhotic — they pronounced r sounds clearly — and that quality spread through parts of Appalachia and the Midwest, from Baltimore and southern Ohio to Michigan and even into the Pacific Northwest. Robin Dodsworth, a linguistics professor at North Carolina State University, notes that older speakers in some of these areas still use the pronunciation, though it is less frequent in the Midlands today.
The variant has been recorded in print for well over a century. Philologist Frederick Thomas Elworthy discussed similar dialect forms in an 1875 paper, and the 1897 poem by James Whitcomb Riley includes the line about someone having ‘warshed his hands.’
Why does an r appear where standard spelling lacks one? Nicole Holliday, an acting associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley, points to how speech sounds influence one another. The American r is relatively uncommon across languages, and very familiar words are especially prone to small shifts because we say them so often our articulatory system can ‘fill in’ or alter sounds. Coarticulation — the way neighboring sounds affect how you shape your mouth and tongue — can create an r‑like quality before the final ‘sh.’ Lips and tongue positions for ‘wah,’ ‘sh,’ and an r overlap, letting an r slip into the word. Reed recalls a blunt description from a phonetician: when you talk you’re ‘basically just moving hunks of meat around in the air,’ and vowels are squishy and open to such changes.
Once established locally, the pronunciation is passed down. Children raised hearing ‘warsh’ may even spell it that way, and Reed describes a ‘rootedness’ to these pronunciations: they carry family and home associations — someone’s aunt, grandfather, or grandmother — and that emotional weight helps them persist.
The pronunciation also functions as a regional marker. In Baltimore, for example, locals recognize and sometimes embrace ‘warsh’ as part of the city’s sound: John Waters’ films capture that accent, country songs have echoed it, and public figures have been noted for saying ‘Warshington.’ A Washington Post columnist reported readers writing in to comment on the variant.
Still, linguists say the feature is waning. Dodsworth attributes the decline mainly to population movement and mixing rather than to online culture. Holliday emphasizes that language is living and will continue to change.
In the end, whether you say ‘wash’ or ‘warsh’ is more than pronunciation — it’s a small historical record of migration patterns, family traditions, regional identity, and the subtle mechanics of speech that let one sound slip into another.