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

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.

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I prefer the English sensibility on this myself, Michelle. Read The Onomastic Cringe, which is still a classic.

Oh, I remember “The Onomastic Cringe,” and it indeed a classic. But that’s not “the English sensibility,” which is what I was trying to say. To my ears, the BBC announcers were almost exaggeratedly “accurate” about most of the major European languages, but lackadaisically Anglified their Spanish, and I wondered why.

Believe me, I’m not of the pronounce-it-as-we-do-or-die school, which is a good thing, because in many, many cases I couldn’t pronounce a word or a name “properly” to save my life. (FWIW, I always kind of liked the hearty way Löwenbräu cheerfully called itself “LOW-en-brow” in its American TV advertising. As though to say, “hey, we’re just selling beer here, and we really don’t give a flying f’ how it’s pronounced it in Munich.”)

Oh, and at a tie for the longest word in the English language, floccinauccinihilipilification is a lot of fun to say. “Flock-sih-noss-si-ny-hill-ih-pill-ih-fih-CAY-shun.”

And while we’re on the subject of pronunciation, please note that there *is* a sort of consistency when a word that is spelled the same way for a verb and for a noun is pronounced differently. What I mean is that all of the verbs have something in common, and all of the nouns have a different thing in common.

Try it. You’ll notice the accented syllable changes. (And, of course, now that I’m pressed to come up with an example, I’m only thinking of single-syllable verbs. Not helpful.)