Steven Pinker. 
:smack: Sorry, my copy of “How Are We to Live?” is right next to my copy of “The Language Instinct”. (Shit, the names almost rhyme…)
The first names have sort of the same cadence too. It’s a really lovely thinko.
I can answer why I’ve posted so vehemently in this thread. I’ve participated in these threads before, but while reading this OP, something just hit me. Can’t explain why, but it did. Namely, the kind of prescriptivism found in these kinds of threads is a form of bigotry. Now, I haven’t fully fleshed out this idea, since it only occurred to me during this thread, but it is certainly true in some form.
Look, the kind of thinking found in the OP is the kind of thinking that keeps people of certain speech communities (e.g., African-Americans) from being heard for what they are saying instead of how they say it. Sure no one is correcting anyone to their face, but for Og’s sake, InvisibleWombat indicated that she would not employ a realtor if they pronounced a specific word differently to her. Never mind the competence of the given realtor, she doesn’t like how they talk.
I know this gets complicated, because one may think something like, “well, I cant employ this Black person as a salesperson, because nobody else will take them seriously. Listen to them!” Well, replace the last sentence with “look at them!” and maybe you can understand my offense.
This shit has consequences. People don’t get hired/promoted/voted for/acquitted because of it. Maybe someone will say that’s why they should speak some standard dialect, but why the hell are we judging people based on dialect in the first place?
[/.02]
I see “Shelia” a lot around my area. Is that an intentional spelling? If so is it pronounced the way it is written? Is it an unwitting misspelling of Sheila which is pronounced as written? I haven’t the guts to say it (She lee ah) to the bank teller/clerk who has it on her name tag.
I’m sure it’s not a misspelling (surely the clerk would notice if her own name tag misspelt her name), and Google backs me up on the plausibility of this. I don’t know how to pronounce it, but then, so many names have so many variant pronunciations anyway. You could always just politely ask the bank teller how to pronounce her name…
There are three things that are always true about language:
It always varies.
It’s always changing.
And someone will always be bitching about one or the other.
The epenthesis of a schwa in words like jewelry and realtor and athlete is totally natural for English. The clusters of w-l-r, l-t-r, and th-l are not found often in the English language and are a bit tricky for the English speaking tongue to get around, especially in terms of the stress in those words. Putting a vowel in there makes it easier for an English speaker to say them. It’s a perfectly natural process, and so it has taken off in some populations. I must stress, though, that this epenthesis is not a result of laziness. Much of language change that you participate (yes, even you) are the result of making something easier to say.
It always amazes me that a group of people who say they appreciate science and rationality will so embrace prescriptivism, much of which is based on the idea that English should be just like Latin, as opposed to the science of descriptivism. I have don’t have much of a problem with prescriptivism if it’s couched in terms of preferences, rather than correctness vs. incorrectness. I can still think it’s silly, though. And I can still see the slippery slope as described by Jamaika a jamaikaiaké and in English with an Accent by Rosina Lippi-Green. Language bigotry is alive and well, whether it be putting African American and West Indian children into speech therapy for the accents they learned in their communities or saying the Latino immigrants refuse to learn English when, in fact, they’re learning it faster than the white immigrants of yesteryear, and so on and so forth. Yeah, a crank on the internet does not quite rank with those examples, but it’s indicative of the larger problem.
But don’t mind me, I just study language variation and change for a living.
Perhaps our worlds are different. There are a LOT of realtors around here. I do not have the time to analyze track records on all of them and determine which ones are the most effective. I must therefore come up with a system for quickly eliminating those I don’t want to work with. Also see my first response below to Indistinguishable.
It is a trade association, however, that produces things like training videos, which I’ve had the opportunity to take a look at. They also produce ads from time to time that encourage the public to deal only with authentic “Realtors ™” and not plain ol’ real-estate agents. These products of the trade association (at least the ones I’ve heard) always pronounce the name of the profession as it’s spelled (RE-AL-TOR). That means it is a homogeneous creature with a single voice.
I agree with you (although I wouldn’t consider using the RE-AL-TOR pronunciation “affected”). HOWEVER, in this case we’re talking about people living in an area where most Realtors say RE-AL-TOR and they’re members of a trade association that says RE-AL-TOR. And I hate to harp on the point, but the word isn’t spelled relator. There’s absolutely no reason to pronounce it that way.
Yes, I understand that if one person says a word differently, it’s a mispronunciation and if thousands pick it up, it becomes an alternate pronunciation. I understand the arguments that “ax” should be considered an acceptable pronunciation of “ask.” But, dammit, this is the PIT, and I jumped in to say that it BOTHERS me when people say RE-LA-TOR. Isn’t that what the Pit is for? I didn’t start a GD thread about this. Heck, I didn’t start a thread at all. I just agreed with someone else that’s bothered by it.
Look, Kendall, I really don’t care how many others say RE-LA-TOR, and I don’t care how the majority of customers might react. This is a Pit thread, and I’m talking about my personal opinion. I have a predisposition toward pronouncing words the way experts in that field pronounce them. As an avid reader, I frequently encounter words in print before I hear them spoken. I pronounce them in my head as they are spelled, according to what passes for standard pronunciation rules in this entertaining mishmash we call the English language. When I look them up in the dictionary, I adopt the first pronunciation listed. So my personal predisposition is strongly against people who ignore the experts, the spelling, and the implied ranking in the dictionary and adopt what appears to me to be a completely illogical pronunciation. I have not, nor will I attempt to, demonstrate how this affects other people. My comments in this Pit thread are about how I react to something I consider a blatant mispronunciation.
I know you’re going to jump on that last sentence, so let me give you some more fodder. I consider “thru” to be a blatant misspelling and “nucular” to be a blatant mispronunciation. I don’t care what dictionaries they’re in. But you can use them and I’ll never say a word about it.
See above. I don’t have time to analyze the property-selling capability of every realtor in town. I’ll simply winnow the field by eliminating many of them right up front by using a variety of techniques. One is to cut every one who says re-la-tor. Next is to cut the ones who can’t express themselves without using offensive words like “motherfucker.” Sorry. That’s just how I am.
They are both mispronunciations. The difference is that one is used by only a few people and one is used by a lot of people.
I’m talking about me. And, of course, people like me. And I am fully aware of the fact that there are people whose opinions are unlike mine. I find it very hard to believe that someone would dismiss a realtor from consideration because she (the realtor) used the industry-standard pronunciation of the name of her profession, even if it is different from the pronunciation used by his particular community, subgroup, or family.
My previous experience differs from yours. I lived in California (a few hundred miles north of L.A.) for quite a few years, and I knew very few people there that would disagree with my definition. I live now in Montana (well over 1,000 miles from L.A.), and I know nobody in my area–except, of course, prior residents of San Diego–who would disagree. “Greater XXX area” just means “the area near XXX.”
Okay. I’ll use it then. I’m easy.
I do realize and acknowledge that each area has a local definition of their “greater” area. Do you realize and acknowledge that someone who doesn’t live in Detroit is unlikely to be aware of the local definition and whether locals consider Ann Arbor to be a part of it?
I don’t disagree that it’s “part of a California accent.” I disagree that it’s the California accent, since it’s restricted to one geographical area. And, of course, if it’s “part of a California accent,” it’s also “part of an American accent.”
See above. I never said anything about “L.A. to the Mexican border.” Frankly, I didn’t realize putting “the” in front of highway numbers extended as far south as San Diego until this thread.
See above. For people not living in an area, the phrase “greater XXX area” is a shortcut for “places close to XXX.” And just for the record, I know exactly how far San Diego is from L.A. I lived in northern California for decades, spent quite a bit of time in L.A., and drove from L.A. to San Diego many times.
You said, and I quote, “You are simply delusional. I won’t even start on the rest of your massive ignorance. Since you clearly have no intention of fighting it, I suggest finding a board that fits your style better, like /b/.” I don’t think one needs to project much to catch your tone. You are basically saying, “agree with me on the meaning of this phrase or begone with you.”
There are linguistic differences between regions, Hostile. I’m happy to stop using the phrase “greater L.A. area” to refer to a big swatch of land around L.A. if it is really so horribly and terribly offensive to residents said big swatch of land, but you have to realize that the farther away something is, the less the local distances matter.
When I lived in the S.F. Bay area, I would tell people from across the country that I lived near San Francisco, because they might not have heard of the town I lived in, despite being over an hour’s drive from there. My brother, who lives around 150 miles from San Francisco (a bit farther than the distance from San Diego to L.A.) does the same thing. Instead of “near San Francisco,” we might just say “in the general area of San Francisco” or “in the greater San Francisco area” because they’re all semantically equivalent unless you live there.
You used asterisks and capitalization to emphasize a word when italics were available. Therefore, you suck as a moderator and are obviously an idiot who deserves shunning.
These snap judgments based on shallow criteria are fun. I should do them more often.
Sorry - missed these two in my previous post:
“He,” just for the record.
I did NOT say I wouldn’t do business with a realtor who (in my opinion) mispronounced the name of his profession. What I said was that it would be one of my first filters for eliminating a hunk of the realtors, narrowing things down to the few I would actually consider.
And it has NOTHING to do with racism, sexism, or any other kind of -ism. First of all, the vast majority of people I’ve heard use the “RE-LA-TOR” pronunciation were white. AFAIK, that pronunciation isn’t a race thing. Second of all, I would obviously make allowances for accents. If you have a strong Jamaican accent, I would fully expect you to pronounce a lot of words differently than I do, and it won’t affect how I view your professionalism. But if you have the same accent I do and you pronounce a word in a way that differs from your trade association’s norm, the spelling of the word, the dictionary’s implied preference (based on order of listings), and the way the vast majority of your associates say it, then that has significance.
There’s a lot more going on than just tossing in a schwa. I don’t hear people saying RE-AL-A-TER. They’re changing the second syllable from “eL” to “Le” (pretend those e’s are schwas).
But that’s really irrelevant. I have to laugh about how my personal opinion about a word being mispronounced by my peers is turning into something about bigotry and racism. I don’t understand where that came from. If you and I live in the same area and speak with the same accent, except that you pronounce words from a certain profession in different, nonstandard ways, I’m not being racist or bigoted if I think that perhaps you’re not much of an expert in that profession.
I do that a LOT. Oops. I guess I’d better turn in my resignation.
Seriously, though, wouldn’t you think less of a moderator who regularly misspelled the word “moderator”?
I’ll bet most of those ads show some consistency in other matters of pronunciation as well (e.g., pronouncing “new” as “noo” rather than “nyoo”, pronouncing “house” without Canadian raising, etc.). But that’s just the ad announcer’s voice; the point is, there’s no edict from on high, even implicitly, that all realtors are expected to hew to the same pronunciations.
The language of “bigotry” is perhaps distracting, and no one is saying this particular instance is a race thing, but, yes, you are displaying idiotic prejudice. Absent strong evidence otherwise, there’s no good reason to believe that that these pronunciation matters (e.g., using a pronunciation which is popular, but not the most popular) reveal anything significant about one’s competence in a profession.
Sure. But I don’t live in LA, and I would never, in a million years, say that San Diego is part of the “greater LA area” anymore than I would say Milwaukee is part of the “greater Chicago area” or that Philadelphia is part of the “greater New York City area.” Come on, now. San Diego and LA are 120 miles apart, and they’re two big cities in their own right. What reasonable person would consider San Diego part of greater LA?
How is that not epenthesis of a schwa? Do you pronounce realtor with three syllables, and consider the “mispronunciation” as also having three? Because it’s two and three syllables for me, and the only difference is a schwa. realter vs. reale*ter. Looking at M-W’s pronunciation, they say it can be three (without epenthesis), but their auditory version is the two syllable one I’m familiar with. Either way, it’s a very simple linguistic process, most likely metathesis in your explanation, that allows for ease of pronunciation. wanders off, muttering something about an empirical study…
And the fact that you won’t give your business to a person because of how they say one word, I consider that bigotry of a kind. Like I said, not on par with some of the racist language bigotry, but prejudice nonetheless. And, for the record, when I was referring to a crank, I meant the OP and not you. I had honestly forgotten about this particular side conversation when I wrote my post. And just because this is the pit doesn’t mean people can’t complain right back. You’ve stumbled upon something people have strong feelings about.
I already said that you were entitled to your opinions. I stand by that. But that doesn’t change the fact that most of this is post hoc justification for you to continue to believe what you already wanted to believe. You’re free to wave the banner of personal preferences at any time (I do it plenty, myself), but I’m still going to point out when the justifications you offer for your opinions are at odds with the facts, even if your complaints are in the Pit.
It would actually be refreshing if you didn’t care what the dictionaries say. There aren’t many weird people like that out there, and it would be a pleasant change to talk with one and try to puzzle out their strange perspective on lexicography. But of course, your own disregard of the dictionary is entirely selective. You’re more than happy to cite it when you think it backs you up. That’s abundantly clear from the previous post in which you complain about people who (you think) haven’t bothered to look in it.
Of course, that particular position got blasted from under your feet, so it was time to shift the goalposts. Now dictionaries have an “implied” preference. Of course, that once again undercuts what you just said because it’s yet more proof that you do choose to care about what it says in those books, but only as long as you think it justifies what you’re saying. I don’t really have any idea how you’d decide between the alternative (standard) pronunciations that have a different order in different dictionaries, but I’m sure you could once more devise an ad hoc system of preferences right quick if you wanted.
That still leaves your claim that you prefer what the “experts” say, but that is again only true when you want it to be. It’s quite likely that the majority of experts who work with nuclear weapons say “nucular”. Jimmy Carter was on a nuke submarine, remember? He didn’t pronounce it the way you want. In fact, linguists have spotted an interesting split in the pronunciation coming from a lot of “nucular” speakers: when talking about weapons and the like, they’ll say “nucular”, but in other contexts (e.g. when they’re talking about the nuclear family), their pronunciation will often change.
This sort of stuff is fascinating to me. It represents real facts about the real language as it’s used out there every single day. Pure information here, not imaginary ideals, not plastic principles that can be continually reworked to justify the same old conclusions no matter how much new data is brought to the table, which is what your arguments allow every single time. Just another example of that: You also claim to have a supposed preference about spelling, but of course you also have arbitrarily decided that “thru” is a mis-spelling whereas the mysterious beast that is “through” (thro-ug-huh?) somehow meets your approval. So there’s obviously yet another language justification lurking back there that you haven’t mentioned yet that you can whip out to support the ridiculous traditional spelling (the one you’ve always preferred) over the orthographical revision. I bet there are a thousand of those little justifications back there in your brain to keep you from ever having to change your language opinions.
Well, once again, you’re free to have your preferences. They’re yours, one and all, no matter what mental contortions are used to justify them. It’s worth repeating just one more thing, though, something I said to you originally:
That evaluation would seem to stand quite well. So “real-a-ter” is a mispronunciation, despite the fact that it’s a part of the standard language? Fine. If you want to stick with a definition of “correct” that means nothing more than “speaks the way I do”, then knock yourself out.
Invisible Wombat, what would you do in the following scenario?
You search high and low for a well-reputationed Realtor to sell your home. You’ve gotten lots of advice from people you trust, and eventually settle on a personable middle-aged lady from Tennessee.
Upon meeting you for the first time, you’re impressed by the Realtor’s professionalism, forthrightness, and charm. Though you can pick up on her subdued Tennessee accent, she consistently approaches Newsspeak pronunciation during your meeting.
As you hold open houses for your property, the Realtor consistently impresses, bringing in several offers and yet assuring you that bigger offers can be gotten. She suggests $150 worth of potted plants for the front porch, and presto – the newest offer is $5000 higher than the previous high. This Realtor is gold for you.
And yet at the last open house you hold – with your closing a few weeks away – your Realtor excuses herself to take a phone call. She just walks into the next room, so you have no trouble hearing her speak to her husband (her high-school sweetheart from Tennessee).
You overhear her telling her husband to get his navy-blue suit dry cleaned for the San Francisco-area Real-e-tors’ Christmas Party. And she goes on to add that yep, it’ll be mostly Real-e-tors there, but spouses are always welcome. Oh, and she reminds him not to forget about her Real-e-tors’ meeting next Tuesday.
Now then, this Realtor has made some good money for you, so I’m sure you’ll do nothing rash. But does your impression of your Realtor change in any way?
…
The above is a highly-common scenario, by the way. The influence of a professional association is likely cause pretty much every actual Realtor to say either “REEL-ter” or “REE-uhl-ter” in professional contexts. However, people often learn words before joining professonal organizations … so a previously learned “REE-le-ter” may well stick in non-professional settings.
So if this highly-successful Realtor should slip up, as humans are wont to do, and slips in a “REE-le-ter” sometime in your initial meeting, you are telling us that you are likely to make a summary decision not to hire her.
What if the Realtor pronounces it “REEL-ter” twenty times during your first meeting, then right after you’ve maded the decision to hire her, she’s overcome with a feeling of goodwill and amity that causes her to blurt out “REE-le-ter”? Do you smack your forehead and say “Well … on second thought …”?
You seem to be getting hung up on the number of people it takes to effect language change, even though it’s been laid out several times.
If only 0.1% of the population votes for Nader, they’re considered cranks who threw away their votes. If 51% vote for Nader, we have a new President. Same deal for language, only less formalized.
I rather like this analogy.
Are we reading the same thread? When I look at a dictionary entry like my Webster’s 3rd has for “Realtor,” I see several pronunciations. When they list one first, and that one (a) matches the spelling, (b) matches the materials from the trade association that “owns” the word, and (c) matches how the vast majority of people who use that title pronounce it, then I consider it the “preferred” pronunciation. Nothing got blasted out from under my feet. The pronunciation I prefer is listed first in every dictionary I own (all seven of them). I used my “implied” preference phraseology because you seem to disagree with me finding significance in the order of the listings.
We seem to be having a rather large disconnect in this thread. Maybe I’m missing something. Can you tell me why disliking a rather uncommon mispronunciation generates such strong feelings in so many people here? Because I think I’ve heard “RE-LA-TOR” in a Realtor’s ad perhaps twice, and both times it was a small-town radio station. I simply assumed nobody had checked it. Although I’ve heard non-Realtors say RE-LA-TOR, I almost never hear a Realtor to say it. Is it, perhaps, more common in other areas?
Really? You can back that claim up? That quite surprises me - and fascinates me.
Again–because this point doesn’t seem to be getting through (thru?) to you–I don’t spend my days correcting people on spelling or pronunciation. One’s use of “thru” in informal communications doesn’t bother me a bit–it’s a shorthand like IMHO or IANAL. As long as it’s treated as a shorthand (an intentional misspelling, if you will), I don’t care. But, yes, it bothered me when it became an accepted alternate spelling. Mostly because if we’re going to drop an old awkward spelling like “through,” the new replacement spelling should match the rest of the language. “Thrue” would have been consistent with “true” and “blue.” Using “threw” would have made sense, since that’s already an acceptable homonym. But I digress…
To my untrained ear, even the “two-syllable” version of that word has a subtle dipthong. Perhaps I hear it more because I expect it. You’re quite right, though, that if you think of it as a two-syllable word, it’s straight epenthesis. My pronunciation comes much closer to three syllables, and most of the folks living around here are similar. The M-W entry lists ˈrē(-ə)l-tər as the first pronunciation, and turning that into rē-lə-tər just seemed a bit more complex to me than sliding a schwa in after the “L”.
When I explained my initial comment, I thought I made it clear. Pronounciation the name of the profession is one of the initial filtering techniques I would use to winnow down a large number of potential realtors to a manageable number so that I could choose which ones to strongly consider. That’s all.
If I already have an existing relationship with the realtor, or if a friend recommended that realtor strongly, that carries far more weight with me, and I wouldn’t even consider terminating the relationship because of it.
So a dictionary lists a number of alternative pronunciations, and you’re contending that it really means that only the first one it lists is actually correct? Why would it list the alternatives, if they weren’t also acceptable? And if it’s just “preferred” (a nebulous idea if ever I heard it) - “preferred” by whom? In what contexts? Does the dictionary say? No, it does not. So aren’t you just picking and choosing definitions to match your preconceptions? Yes, the NAR has a preferred pronunciation, but again, “realtor” has been a generic term for decades; it takes a particularly slavish dedication to IP rights to say that not only does a particular association get to dictate when people use a particular term, but also how they pronounce it. When you’re standing on dictionary order and trade association diktat in preference to demonstrable common usage, one has to question whether your reasoning is forwards or backwards.
I’m guessing it’s because you started out with flat out accusations of wrongness, and stated quite willingly that you adversely judged people on the basis of a pronunciation you’ve now backed off to describing as merely not “preferred”. I don’t particularly have a dog in this fight, living as I do in a country where realtors don’t exist (they’re just estate agents), but I’ve got to say I don’t really understand why you’re sticking to your guns. Why the strenuous effort to justify annoyance at what is apparently a pretty common (and documented) pronunciation? It just seems so arbitrary, and there’s very little that annoys people more than arbitrary judgment. To base one’s opinion of people’s competence on nebulous and debatable (not to mention constantly shifting) pronunciation criteria seems pretty odd, if I’m honest.
Most people get their pronunciations not by looking up the relevant trade association’s advice or by checking what comes first in the dictionary, but by osmosis; this is not a procedure which involves the intellect. There seems to me to be no rational basis for correlating non-standard pronunciation with a lack of intelligence, and yet it’s this position to which you’re resolutely clinging. It’s this which I believe is bringing you the most disapprobation, as far as I can see.
When combined with the other three reasons that you quoted (but ignored), I feel that it makes the first one the “right” one.
I never claimed a correlation between the way one pronounces “realtor” and one’s intelligence. I felt, and still feel, that trained professionals who take their job seriously should go to the trouble to pronounce the name of that profession the way their trade association and the overwhelming majority of their customers pronounce it (I won’t repeat my other reasons for preferring that pronunciation, since you quoted them in your post to me). If they don’t do so, then perhaps they aren’t well-trained, aren’t professional, or don’t take their job seriously.
I don’t either. It’s really not worth all of the time and effort that’s going into this thread. I concede. You all win.