You Spell It Potato, Dan Quayle Spells It Potatoe

When was the last time you heard somebody call it a “to-mah-to”?  

 If I said "Last week" it would totally ruin your gag, wouldn't it?

If that were even remotely true, yes...but since it's not, it's pretty irrelevant.  

Imagine that.  The imaginary reader of an internets blag being irrelevant.  What is the world coming to?

So, you hear the phrase all the time when comparing two similar things.  "You say tomato, I say tomato."  It doesn't come across very well in print, but the speaker uses two different pronunciations of the word "Tomato."  One being the standard "to-MAY-to" pronunciation, and the other being the very pretentious-sounding "to-MAH-to" which should be spoken while wearing a monocle and a long mustache.  It's akin to putting an extra "pe" at the end of "shop."  

Anyway, the phrase is used to indicate a similarity between two ostensibly different things, to the point where any differences that can actually be found don't matter, since the two pronunciations of "tomato" both refer to the same piece of fruit.  Yes, tomato is a fruit.  Yeah, Science!

The problem being that nobody ever uses the "to-mah-to" pronunciation.  You don't hear it...ever.  Even if you watch the Food Network all day, you won't hear it. 

What bugs me here is that when somebody uses the full phrase "You say tomayto, I say tomahto," they don't actually say "tomahto" ever...except in that phrase.  They're lying to me about what they say, yet I'm supposed to take their word on the fact that two things are the same.  They no longer have any integrity.  I miss integrity...