She raised you to be a dialect bigot?
Escalator became esculator (with the “u” pronounced - “ess-kyoo-lay-tor”).
Percolator/percolates became perculator/perculates (with the “u” pronounced again).
Especially became exspecially.
Edmonton became Emmonton.
Hamburger became hammurger.
Whatcha gonna do? (The “realator” thing and “nukeyoolar” still bug me.)
Continue to pronounce words correctly? It’s worked pretty well for me so far.
Sherbet, damnit!
I’ve never heard anyone pronounce escalator as “ess-kyoo-lay-tor.”
And yet the masses still “mispronounce” iron as iorn.
Yes. That’s right. :rolleyes:
I capitalized the word “realtor” because it was the first word of a(n) (improper) one-word sentence. As were the two other picked-out words in my OP.
I swear, it doesn’t pay to be a pedant in the Pit! 
Carry on…
If you’re going to give realtor its proper recognition, it’s “REALTOR!!!1!!”
I’ve heard people pronounce it “esculator.” Just keep your ears open - I’m sure you’ll hear it eventually.
Soooo. What’s the word count for establishing a new dialect?
If I pronounce rascal as rass-kewl do I have a new dialect?
Or does it take two words? Three?
I’m thinking a lot of people are hiding behind the dialect shield to get away with shoddy English. I’d bet the folks who say sher-bert have about 99.9% of their language in common with me, a sher-bit slinger.
The only one of these alternate pronunciations I’ve ever heard is ‘exspecially’ which, as the dumbth of America continues to spread, is becoming as disturbingly common as ‘expresso’.
‘realator’ kind of grates with me as well. After 8 years of the Dunderhead in Chief, however, I’ve become numb to ‘nukular’.
It’s number of people, not number of words. The SoCal residents who say “the” before route numbers form a dialect.
The speech pattern of a single person is an idiolect.
Who the hell says “hammurger”? Round these parts it’s pronounced “meat disk”.
And, what is that “route number dialect” called?
My pet peeve pronunciations:
mischevous as mis-CHEE-vee-us
sammich instead of sandwich
And I will never be OK with nuke-u-lar.
Hey, :rolleyes: back at you! I’m not the one who started a pit thread complaining about people who dare speak differently than my arbitrary definition of ‘correct.’
Admitting your bigotry is the first step to overcoming it.
You’re getting pretty defensive there. Strike a nerve?
Arbitrary indeed.
See, there are people in your own community that say for example sher-bit or sher-but without adding the imaginary r.
What do you have to say about them?
Descriptivism > prescriptivism, yo.
Why anyone gives a damn how other people pronounce words is beyond me, no matter how popular or not the pronunciation is (though, of course, the usages that get bitched about the most are also the most popular, making the bitching the least reasonable). And in the majority of cases, thinking one can infer significant information about intelligence from pronunciation is highly misguided.
They are better than me, for the pronunciation they picked up from hearing people around them happens to correlate a little better with the arbitrary spelling of some isolated word than the pronunciation I picked up from hearing people around me.