Whats your gripe

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Nereus
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Whats your gripe

Post by Nereus »

Word misuse gets up goat of sticklers

https://thewest.com.au/opinion/word-mis ... b88329662z

Image: Anartic or Antarctic? It’s a commonon mispronounciation...or mispronunciation.

Bill Stickler told a meeting of the Society of Pedants (WA) that he was surprised at the big number of people who complained about common misuses of words. Indeed, it seemed just about everyone he met wanted to tell him about his or her pet language-mangling hate, the SOP president said.

It was evident to him that slovenly language use seriously annoyed many people. Some of them told him that they grimaced or yelled at their television sets or radios when they heard a solecism. They grumbled about mistakes they saw in print.

Mr Stickler’s talk to members was mainly a summary of the language complaints sent to the SOP this year. He said there had been many complaints about mispronunciations.

He had the impression that people of retirement age or older still put a high value on correct pronunciations — on being “well spoken”, an expression that seemed to have faded from common use over the past few years. Younger people generally seemed to be less bothered about mispronunciation.

Ironically, one of the complaints he read was about the mispronunciation of “mispronunciation”. The complainer wrote that he noticed the apparently increasing currency of “mispronounciation” and “pronounciation”.

He had not counted the number of complaints about the mispronunciation of any particular word. However, he had the impression that the words that drew the most complaints were “ceremony” (mispronounced as
“cere-moany”), “vulnerable” (“vunerable”) and “mischievous” (“mischievious”).

Of course, there were the usual complaints about “Australia” being mispronounced on-air as “Austraya”. Other common mispronunciations that caused annoyance were those of “probably” ( “probly”), “supposedly” (“supposably”), “espresso” (“expresso”) and “Antarctic” (“Antartic”).

Mr Stickler believed that such mispronunciations were mostly the results of carelessness, slips of the tongue, ignorance or indifference.

However, he also had to acknowledge that there were pronunciation traps in English, because many words were not pronounced as their spellings suggested they should be.

He remembered Julia Gillard was caught in one of those traps about five years ago, when she notoriously mispronounced “hyperbole” as “hyper-bowl” in an interview. She was the prime minister at the time and attracted mockery for her mistake. (Australia's most embarrassing prime minister :guns: )

A part of the problem was that English had imported many words from other languages. Such words often either kept their original spellings, or elements of them, but were often pronounced differently from how they were spelt. For example, the “b” in “debt” was superfluous and not sounded. It was there only because it was in the Latin word from which “debt” was derived.

Another part of the problem was that pronunciations changed over time. The current edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage noted that: “In general terms, written English has remained relatively static since the invention of printing in the late 15th century, but spoken English, in its received (standard) form, has changed repeatedly since then.”

Mr Stickler said he pitied people who were learning English as a second or subsequent language. He thought they would struggle constantly to try to make sense of the language’s seemingly capricious spelling system.

It was not surprising that there had been campaigns for many years to simplify English spelling. However, he disagreed with people who preached spelling reform.

They proposed artificial, cold-blooded changes that would deny the history of the language and interfere high-handedly with its natural development. In any case, he and other word-watchers loved and respected the English language for its majestic eccentricities.
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The mispronunciation that gets up my nose the most is the frequent use of "tur-bin" when referring to a "turbine", mostly by our friends form the USA. (without prejudice :rasta: )
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dtaai-maai
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by dtaai-maai »

Bill Stickler... :laugh: :laugh:
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sateeb
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by sateeb »

Hmmm..so many.

Golfers who regularly refer to the Stapleford system of scoring......STABLEFORD!!!

Men who talk about their "prostrate" problems...PROSTATE!!!! ( mine's the size of a watermelon BTW)
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Vital Spark
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by Vital Spark »

'Pacifically' instead of SPECIFICALLY - I hear it a lot when I'm in Suffolk.

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Phil D
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by Phil D »

Somethink rather than something!
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Dannie Boy
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by Dannie Boy »

Phil D wrote:Somethink rather than something!
Don't you mean somefink :duck:
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by HHTel »

Don't you mean summat. While I was out walking summat fell on me 'ed!
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by J.J.B. »

To all intensive purposes...
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Ginjaninja
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by Ginjaninja »

'init'
hhinner
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by hhinner »

I could care less. Oh, wait a minute. No, I couldn't.
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by HHTel »

At end o' day, if summat dunt 'appen, then nowt will.
lindosfan1
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by lindosfan1 »

You know at the end of every sentence.
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by RCer »

There, their, they're, being used interchangeably.
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MDMK
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Re: Whats your gripe

Post by MDMK »

I hate

OF instead of HAVE
OF instead of 'VE

I could of won that game
I should of won that game

People don't just write it wrong, they say it wrong too. Not sure why it annoys me so much, but it does.
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