"Fauxghee" is one of the best puns ever. I have a sneaking suspicion that they started with that pun and worked backwards.
> Elderly volunteers (or "mulchees") are provided with generous payments for their families before being rendered down and recombined with other chemicals into a range of substitutes for common foodstuffs, including hash browns (Grandmash™), bananas (Nanas™) and butter (Fauxghee™).
So one meaning is Faux Ghee (faux as in fake, Ghee as in a type of clarified butter, originating from South Asia) which follows the naming conventions of real substitute foods like Faux Turkey.
And the second meaning is "Fogey" as in an old person.
You meant "punny". Puny with one n means "small and weak".
Faux is imitation
Ghee is a type of clarified butter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghee
It actually doesn't, at least the way "ghee" is pronounced in the native languages where the word originates from. English doesn't quite have the strongly voiced "g" sound, so western people pronounce it incorrectly as "gee".
I’ve only heard it like “goat” in Texas.
That has an audio recording of someone pronouncing it. Sounds like it’s the former per your example.
Off the top of my head, the only American English sound I can think of that'd come close would be the Americanized pronunciation of "Ghent," as demonstrated in this random YouTube video I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meuBUq3K3XY
So take the "Gh" sound from "Ghent" in that video, and then tack on a long e — and there's your ghee.
Then I looked up the ipa standard pronunciations for both from wiktionary:
enPR: gē, IPA(key): /ɡiː/ (South Asia) IPA(key): [ɡʱiː]
Perhaps it’s just you?
You might not hear the difference as the English language does not assign meaning to that difference. But if I pronounce 'key' or 'pin' without aspiration, you may feel that I speak with an accent or even mishear it as 'bin':
> Pronouncing them as unaspirated in these positions, as is done by many Indian English speakers, may make them get confused with the corresponding voiced stop by other English-speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Allophonic
Also, the point in this subthread is not how you should pronounce the word in English. The point is that English speakers (or most other people in the world for that matter) cannot pronounce the word the way it's pronounced in the regions where ghee and its name is originally from.
Trying to sum it up: different languages have different sounds and you may not be able to hear and/or pronounce the differences. Your sibling comment mentions the English lice-rice distinction which is difficult to some Japanese/Chinese natives. Is saying 'lice' when you mean 'rice' just a different accent?
Going further, people don't observe these details of how they speak their own language and thus cannot reflect or explain to others. Quoting Wikipedia again:
> Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as a single distinctive sound and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations that are used to pronounce single phonemes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
It's the exact same way Indians mispronounce many English words when they map it to some equivalent native sounds.
Maybe English speakers are "blind" to the aspirated / unaspirated distinction, similar to how Japanese speakers tend to struggle with English's L/R distinction?
A physical experiment you can try from the Wikipedia article:
> to feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say spin [spɪn] and then pin [pʰɪn]. One should either feel a puff of air or see a flicker of the candle flame with pin that one does not get with spin.
If you think that, your ear is simply not hearing the difference because the sound does not exist in your language.
The Wiktionary is in fact listing two different pronunciations of the word. The one mentioned under South Asia is the correct one.
Except for the fact that the pun only works if you mispronounce "ghee".