I’m glad you enjoyed it. I aim to create the highest grade sarcasm this side of the Mississippi.
I’m not the one who bitched that people should “look in a freaking dictionary” when the dictionaries in fact support both pronunciations. That was you. You don’t like a snarky tone when someone points out how sloppy you were? Fine. I can take it down a notch. In return, I expect that you pay attention to what I’m actually saying, instead of attributing to me points I haven’t made. More on that below:
First, you’re completely and utterly wrong about this being unrelated to linguistics. This sort of discussion is highly relevant to linguistics. True, it is not the primary focus of most linguists, but these topics relate strongly to sociolinguistics, which does not belong to some other field. It a part of the whole.
And I freely admit, it’s true that people will often have a negative impression of others who use a different pronunciation. You might even be right that realtors especially (who hold that trademarked title as members of a professional organization) are particularly vulnerable to adopting this negative impression. What you have not demonstrated, nor even attempted to demonstrate, is how a majority of customers might react. You have only your personal distaste. But if a realtor lives in an area whose dialect is marked with the real-a-ter pronunciation, it might in fact behoove this realtor to choose the (completely standard) alternate pronunciation.
If they still push real estate like a mean, lean, property-selling motherfucker, then it doesn’t really matter what the other people think. As long as they have a positive reputation in their local community, the others can suck eggs.
Incorrect. Absolutely, positively, unequivocally incorrect. I have not once in this thread, nor in any other, pushed a view that there are no standards. This is a classic strawman, and I’m not going to deal with it again, but Geoff Pullum deals with it here.
Not a comparable situation. AT-TRON-NEE is a mispronunciation. You won’t hear it on the news. You won’t hear in in advertisements. You won’t hear it from attorneys. Real-e-ter is standard. You can hear it on the news, you will hear it in advertisements, and you will it this pronunciation from professionals (meaning professional realtors).
For some people, sure. But not for everybody. We’ve already had one person in this thread who seems to have said that the original pronunciation sounds wrong. This sort of thing happens when there are multiple pronunciations. It’s normal.
Dismissed out of hand by you. And someone who uses your preferred pronunciation might be dismissed out of hand by someone else. By an entire community, even. I’m not saying that happens often. I really don’t know how prevalent this is. What I do know is that you have no more evidence than I do, and that other deprecated pronunciations have not held back some people from attaining the highest political office in the land (I am referring, of course, to Bill Clinton’s occasional use of “nucular”). Which is why I’m not going to take your personal views on the matter as indicative of some overwhelming societal trend.
I’ll let this snark slide since it was in response to my own. For the record, though, my original claim was: “According to the definitions of Greater Los Angeles Area that I’ve seen, San Diego is not included.” A wiki cite is perfectly appropriate for that. I note also that Hostile Dialect’s location is “San Diego, Obamafornia”, which unless I miss my guess would indicate a level of personal experience. So yes, as I said, San Diego is not included in any of the definitions I’ve seen.
I didn’t call your definition wrong (though I’m inclined to believe it is). I simply stated that it did not fit my previous experience with the term. And how do you respond to that?
False, false, a billion times false. I do not accept any mispronunciation as acceptable. And I did, in fact, accept your definition for the sake of argument.
I don’t think that’s true. From my own travels, it’s always appeared to me that each “greater” area is defined specifically for the region.
It actually does make me happier if you use “general area around LA”. It jives better with my own idiolect.
More to the point, though, it’s perfectly fine if you want to be more precise. I tend to approve precision, and I did find it interesting that the Northern California peeps don’t use that particular construction. But I also approve accurate statements, and it was inaccurate for you to say “No”, when saying “the 101” is, in fact, part of a California accent.
My overarching point, though, is that encouraging people to speak well is hampered if you don’t understand how language works. I, for one, think real-e-ter sounds a little bit stupid. But, as I said just before, I’m not going to mistake my own preferences as perfect guidelines for English. There is absolutely a place for good prescriptivism in the world, but only as long as prescriptivists make arguments about aesthetics instead of notions of “correctness”, which (I say again) the vast majority of them don’t understand.