Tomayto - Tomahto

To travel between the “New World” and the “Old World”, cache to cache.

This “Trackable” came about when 3 things came together: my wife and I were planning a cruise around the British Isles; a series of TB tags arrived in the mail and I was looking for an item to become a trackable.

We had been watching some British TV shows and commenting on how they have different words or sometimes different pronunciations of the same word we use. Very soon after, I came across this pin/needle holder shaped like a “tomato” and thought it would make an interesting trackable with a goal for it's travels.

At first reading, it looked like the different spellings of the word “tomato” or “tomatoe” are the different ways the word is pronounced with “to-may-to” being American and the “tom-ah-to” being British.

Then the meaning for the phrase with both words together was explained to indicate:

- a negligible, trivial, or unimportant difference, distinction, or correction.

- a way of saying that your apparent difference in opinion is either trivial or doesn't really exist at all (the same thing being said different ways).

- it doesn't matter whether you say it with a different accent, it's still the same thing. So the expression means: it doesn't matter.

 - it's a way of dismissing a noted or claimed or supposed difference between two things as trivial.

Then as I researched on I found:

“Attitudinally, it combines an acknowledgement of some difference while simultaneously waving that difference away as not worth bothering with. “

I hadn't thought of a word as having an “attitude”!

The next thing I found was:

“the pronunciation "to-mah-to" is, at least to ears attuned to US pronunciation, connotatively "upper class," the dismissal gains a subtle heft since to insist on the validity of the "obviously" a trivial difference makes one fussy and highfalutin, a stickler and a snob over petty differences.”

Now there's a mouthful and not of “tomato”.

Just think what you might find out if you started to research other words like: sweets vs candies; chemist vs pharmacy; mummy vs mah-me; dawters vs daughters; quitting vs quidding (a quid is an English bank note); Donna vs Dana; spade vs shovel; “in the garbage” vs “in the bin”; and lastly “wawter” vs “waaater” - is it the pronunciation or the meaning?