Some 20 or so years ago, when I was still a late teenager, I found myself amongst a group of well-read friends who laughed at me. Why were they amused? I referred to the subject of “coitus,” and I pronounced it “COY-tus.” Although I have since found that modern dictionaries now accept this pronunciation, the commonly accepted pronunciation at the time, and the preferred one still, is “co-EYE-tus.” Coital activities are preferentially referred to as “co-EYE-tal,” and your joyful acts of coition are best pronounced as “co-ISH-un.”
Some years later I dated a lovely lady–who I rather regret losing track of as a friend, even though I am quite happily married today–who once mispronounced a word in my presence. When that happened, I instinctively corrected her. Then I immediately apologized for being so didactic. To my surprise she said, “Oh no, not at all. When you correct someone’s pronunciation you’re just giving them a compliment.”
“Oh?”
“Sure. If you laugh at them you’re being a jerk, but if you correct them all you’re doing is offering a minor favor–and noticing that they are well-read.”
She was right you know. Almost invariably, if a person uses a word in a sentence, and she mispronounces it, it means that she has 1) read the word at least once, and probably more than once, 2) correctly teased out the meaning from context, and 3) absorbed it well enough that she can properly use it in a sentence.
Given that the English language has hundreds of thousands of words–which is far more than most languages–should it not be considered a sign of erudition if someone occasionally uses a word and doesn’t pronounce it right? Indeed, what else could it possibly mean, except that the person is well-read and is familiar with words she has never heard pronounced aloud?
Here are some great English words that I’ll bet a lot of people recognize but might not pronounce right:
bivouac
mischievous
assuage
exiguity
plethora
coitus
lissom
scion
verdant
avarice
raucous
insouciant
puerile
winsome
polyglot
umbrage
facile
intransigent
paucity
fatuous
inchoate
chimera
Maybe you recognize half of those words. Hell, maybe you recognize all of them. They’re all worth looking up. But can you say with confidence that you are exactly certain how to pronounce every single one of them? I can, but only because I picked them out of my head and looked them up. I’m sure you could come up with a list I might pronounce wrong. And so here’s the important question:
If someone you knew said, “That seems like a FACE-ile argument,” or said “your opinion seems rather in-CHOTE,” or “my friend from Europe is a “pole-EE-gloat,” or referred to “my LISS-some” friend, would you assume that whoever uttered those words was stupid? Or just that he had never heard those words pronounced aloud?
(For the record, the proper pronunciation of those words is “FASS-iyle,” “in-KO-it,” “PALL-ee-glott,” and “LIE-some.”)
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” . . . indeed is a classic.” And “As though as to say . . .” Sorry. And to think I’d just previewed it to make sure the umlauts were OK.
As a kid, despite knowing and using the word “facetious”, I always read it as “facet-us”.
I was probably 15 before I realized they were the same word.
My father, who was an English teacher, taught me the term for mispronouncing a word because you’d only seen it in print, not heard it said aloud: orthographic pronunciation. He said it was an honorable flaw, a trait of people who read a lot and were intellectually upwardly mobile.
Nope: lissom has a short (breve) i, as per the i in ‘hit’. British pronunciation of facile is short a, long i (a as in ‘cat’, i as in ‘pie’). A number of your other pronunciations sound odd to my ears. This is of course a problem with any pronunciation guide. More accurate rendering can be achived with Unicode encodings of IPA phonetic symbols. For example, in the US, the word ‘garage’ has a sort of faux-French pronunciation: gəräzh, whereas in British English it’s gărĭj. Further, RP British English (my accent) is non-rhotic, US English is (in general) rhotic. We distinguish ‘t’ and ‘d’ more strongly, so that ‘coating’ and ‘coding’ sound quite different in RP.
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David Gillies,
I’ve actually seen “garage” spelled (er, spelt) in England as “garridge,” which is pronounced pretty well as it looks, with the first syllable accented.
Re ‘d’ vs. ‘t,’ I came back from a year in London with “an accent,” of which the one vestige people still notice 16 years later is that I emphasize my ‘t’s, especially at the ends of words, but also internally.
>(For the record, the proper pronunciation of those words is “FASS-iyle,” “in-KO-it,” “PALL-ee-glott,” and “LIE-some.”)
uh… no. facile is correct, the others are not.
using your syntax:
in-KO-ate
POLL-ee-glott
LISS-um (or LISS-some)
but i must wholeheartedly applaud Richard Cohen’s father’s words (previous commenter)
but it’s a fluid constantly changing language. and if you want to REALLY amuse yourself, read books from the 17th and 18th centuries, and discover that words don’t mean the same thing now as they did then. like “discover”- which meant something closer to “show” (uncover). and words like though and through and bough, were all pronounced thuff, thruff, and buff.
cheers
Sal
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