Eccentric Flower:199901/little words and Ivy

twenty-five january

little words and Ivy

Today I added a new pixie here to help me sort the sets and backdrops. Her name is Ivy and she finds things. Which is good, because sometimes I forget that I've already ranted about a given subject, and I repeat myself.

And then, there are some subjects I know I've done before, but I can always find something new to say about them. For example, if one were looking for "footnotes" to today's postcard (heaven help you), one could simply ask Ivy for the words "prescriptive dictionary" and then would easily be able to read Our Story So Far.

Now, then.

I have here a book which is a shoe-in for Best Argument-Starter Of The Year. In fact, I haven't seen a likelier candidate in many years. If you fancy a good fight, just get this book and read almost any entry aloud to someone you love.

It's called The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations by Charles Harrington Elster. I will resist the temptation to draw conclusions about people who insist on using three names in their credit, but I will say without reservation that Elster is a hardheaded, overprescriptive, fuddy-duddy of an orthoepist snot.

Yes, I had to look up "orthoepist" too; Elster uses it constantly to describe himself, which should tell you something. It means someone who is concerned with correct pronunciation. Elster is certainly that. The problem is in his definition of "correct."

If you read the items Ivy hands you, above, you'll see that I've been fretting for a while about which side of the descriptive-prescriptive fence I should stand on. I believe that "proper" pronunciation, in almost all cases, is what the majority uses. If ninety percent of the people start pronouncing a word a particular way, and they keep doing it that way, the correct pronunciation has just changed. Language is what we make it and nothing more. There is no "higher authority."

But on the other hand I freely admit that there are some pronunciations used by a vast number of people which strike me as disgusting, a sign of either laziness or ignorance or both, and I will stitch my lips together before I use any of those. So clearly I have a prescriptive side too.

Elster is flat-out prescriptive. He tells you in several places - not usually in these words - "I don't care if everyone else says it that way, that way is wrong. Say it the right way - you'll get strange looks from everyone, but you'll have the satisfaction of knowing you're right."

I'd tell you what I think of that idea, but such language is unladylike. Suffice to say that I will never pronounce "flaccid" as FLAX-id, even though Elster makes his case magnificently and the dictionaries back him up.

My main dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Tenth Collegiate, (hereafter MW10), which is arguably the most permissive dictionary in print, lists FLAX-id second. But there's a catch! Its first pronunciation, FLASS-id, is marked with the Dreaded Obelus (the little division sign which is the closest MW10 ever comes to saying "we consider this incorrect"). Most people don't even know that's what that symbol means.

Got that? MW10 lists the most common pronunciation first, so this is Secret Code for "Actually, we think most people say this word the wrong way." Shockingly harsh, from the anything-goes MW10. Now, are you going to change the way you say "flaccid"?

Me neither.

Are you going to say "grimace" as gri-MAYS, the way Elster does? Of course not. All right, even he admits he's being a hardnose on that one; I think he likes saying it just so he can argue with people about it.

Elster often makes good points - and I'm not just talking about the times I happen to agree with him (I've been telling people for years that Andrew Carnegie's surname has the emphasis on the second syllable - a mistake you do not make twice in Pittsburgh).

He goes off on a two-and-a-half page rant on "bulimia," which he pronounces byoo-LIM-ee-uh. You can say "boo" for the first part if you like; it's the "lee" in the second syllable that frets him. He traces the word all the way back to 1398, where it was "bulimy" and meant "ox hunger." He makes the excellent point that until recently this word was hardly ever spoken, confined to medical journals, that most dictionaries concede that his pronunciation is the correct one, and that the reason it's wrong is because nobody ever bothered to look it up before saying it - all of which I agree with.

But, confound it, laws to sweep back the tide just don't work. Are you going to start saying byoo-LIM-ee-uh? You are? You're a brave one, then. Some of the worst humiliations of my life, the ones I replay in my head when I can't sleep, are times when I said a word aloud that I'd only ever seen written - and everyone laughed at the way I said it. My priorities are such that I'd rather risk mispronunciation than humiliation.

In addition to being a diehard squarehead, Elster is often petty, fighting about syllable emphasis on two-syllable words like "chastize," where most of us give the syllables such close-to-equal emphasis that it's hardly worth fussing over, or kvetching about the pronunciation of the final syllable of "ambassador." Who cares? Well, Elster cares. One gets the impression he feels that to neglect even these minor battles will result in the decay of the American language.

The language is incapable of decay. It is, however, capable of evolution.

Elster is also a Yankee. I usually don't have any regional biases, except when someone does something boneheaded ... like insisting that you don't pronounce the "l" in words like "calm" and "palm." Maybe you don't in New York City, sirrah, but in Louisiana we do. Furthermore if I heard someone say "com" for "calm" there, I'd think they were ignorant or from some alien place - which, come to think of it, describes NYC pretty well.

(Not even heavy drawlers would say "com." In a thick Southern drawl, it comes out "cawm.")

In the entry for "almond," Elster admits that he has received numerous flaming missives about the "lm" words. He basically throws up his hands and says "Say the darned 'l' if you want; I don't care." And that's Elster's saving grace. He admits that he's pigheaded. He admits he likes a good fight. He admits it when the weight of popular usage is against him.

If one could only get him to admit that the whole mess is Not Especially Important on the grand scale of things, that his book is a good read and a great argument-starter but little else, he'd be just about perfect.

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