![]() But what about single women? Were they ever permitted to go out in public unchaperoned? Yes. Married ladies throughout history had no need for chaperones, because they were protected by their husbands’ reputations. ![]() It is clear that most teenage girls were considered rebellious and unappreciative of their chaperones. Perhaps they were viewed by the working classes as a symbol of upper class snobbery. The role of chaperone was rapidly decreasing in popularity in America during the 1890s. According to her, 19 th Century American mothers had the sullied reputation of allowing their daughters to go about with young men alone in public. John Sherwood wrote that a young lady’s most natural chaperone is, of course, her own mother, but Sherwood criticized American mothers for being careless in their duties. In her etiquette guide published in 1887, Mrs. What I discovered is that chaperones were far more common in British society than in America. (And in balcony, it was respelled to -ony).In researching historical facts for my 1890s Christian romance novel, I wanted to know if my heroine needed a chaperone. So English words taken from Italian often are spelled with a final e, which in many words is pronounced as a separate vowel (such as in minestrone) but in some words is silent, or optionally silent ( trombone, provolone, calzone). This differs for example from apron /ˈeɪprən/ which had the same suffix in French but was borrowed earlier and now has a reduced schwa vowel (or a syllabic nasal) in English.Īnother possible source of confusion is that the Italian augmentative suffix - one is spelled with an e. All the dictionaries I've found say that the primary stress in chaperon(e) falls on the first syllable, but some transcribe secondary stress on the third, and all seem to agree that it has an unreduced vowel (the Oxford English Dictionary gives the following three pronunciations: /ˈʃapərɒn/ /ˈʃapərɔːn/ /ˈʃapərəʊn/). For most of these words, it seems to be connected to the stress or vowel quality of the last syllable. An "extra" e also occurs in some words taken from other languages such as German ( chorale, ketone). There are other words from French that don't refer to female people, but have definitely have gained an e, such as morale, locale, ladrone (the last one seems to be also taken from Spanish ladrón). If this is the actual origin of the spelling, I guess it would make it doubly erroneous now, since in modern usage the word is often gender-neutral.īut it's not clear that the e was intended to be a feminine termination. Spell it chaperone, apparently under the supposition that it requires Surprisingly to me, the Oxford English dictionary treats "chaperone" as merely a common error for "chaperon", not even listing it alongside the other variant spellings such as chapperoon, shaparoon, shaparowne. (I excluded the spoken sections.) So there are clearly some differences across time and space, but chaperon is actually older or more British or both it's definitely not a new American simplified spelling. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 277 instances of chaperone and 60 instances of chaperon from 1990 to 2015. ![]() The BYU-BNC British National Corpus has 32 instances of chaperon and 32 of chaperone from the 1980s to 1993. The corpora I checked indicate that both forms are used on both sides of the Atlantic.
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