That sentence doesn’t mean what you think it means. 
Ah, but not if you’re encountering the word for the first time in written form! It ain’t necessarily obvious.
Ah, but are you pronouncing it “U-C-L-A” or “uck-la”? :dubious:
I always just say it out loud and use the one that sounds right to my ear.But then again I failed english most years in school so what do I know.
I do try to get it right but then see such terrible things on Facebook and a couple of tech forums I’m on I start to think why bother.
I’m not sure what this means. If you’re encountering the word for the first time in written form, you don’t know whether the “h” is pronounced or silent, either.
Another thing that grinds my gears is the business of the naked apostrophe!
If a word is already a regular plural (or sounds like it), you can write the plural possessive with or without the additional “s”: “I love Mel Brooks’s movies” or “I love Mel Brooks’ movies.” Both variants are perfectly acceptable, though the second may be bit easier to pronounce.
Nowadays, I hear the final “s” dropped a lot of times when it shouldn’t be, the most awful example I can think of being in the case of “Jesus”: “Mark was one of Jesus’ disciples.”
WTF is a “Jesus disciple”?!? Clearly, the correct pronunciation is “Jesus-ez,” because Jesus neither is nor sounds like a plural form (which in this case would be “Jesuses”: one Jesus, two Jesuses). The only way to write it that makes sense is “Jesus’s.”
Some style guides will actually tell you to always write “Jesus’,” for reasons I can’t begin to fathom. You pronounce the final “s,” you write the final “s.” Very simple! How can people not get this? :smack:
Correct. You have to make an educated guess. Which way would you go, for example, with “homage,” assuming you’re seeing it for the first time?
I pulled the book up on Google Books. There were no hits for “normality” or “normalty” but several references to “normalcy.”
I did find a similar statement in Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History, by Anne Curzan, p 107, but the excerpt on Google Books doesn’t give a source. She argues that normality was in the speech but he misspoke and said normalcy and then embraced his mistake because it made for a good term. Nothing about “normalty.”
This is suggested by Harding’s own testimony on the subject in the New York Times, July 21, 1920.
That’s seems to be the exact opposite of what your cite says, and it seems odd that the Times wouldn’t have noted that since they ran a number of articles on the word.
However, The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections, by Yanek Mieczkowski has it that way on p90. Again, footnotes are not available.
It all makes me curious to know the source on this. I can’t find a copy of the original speech online. Nor can I find contemporary references to reporters being involved in changing the word. Or later ones except for Routledge, which obviously just draws on secondary sources. Weird.
Always??? You’re not even always doing in this very same post.
Which is different from the sound rule how? (I would probably guess “a” if I saw “homage” for the first time. Regardless, both “a” or “an” are okay, depending on how you pronounce it.)
He’s saying–as far as I understand–you always put “A” in front of " ‘U’ = yew," that is, when the initial “u” makes the “yew” sound. In “uncle,” the “u” does not make a “yew” sound.
If you’re using the Phoenemic Alphabet, that sound is written /ju:/ and is referred to as a “jotated” vowel, the “J” being pronounced as it is in German (like “Y”).
Yes, /ju/ or /ju:/ in IPA.
That’s fine. Likewise it sounds ridiculous to our American ears when you say 'ello and other words that you drop the H from.
I see. But that’s missing the point. As terentii indicates above, we all know how people pronounce “UCLA”–as an initialism–so that’s easy.
But what if you’re writing about something less known, like the Football Association of Wales (FAW). And let’s say you don’t know how people pronounce it there. It’s possible that everyone in Wales pronounces it as /fa/, so they say, “It’s a FAW team.” But you might assume that it’s an initialism (not an acronym), and write, “It’s an FAW team.” You might do this because you never hear people talking about it–you only read about it, and you have never happened to come across the name “FAW” preceded by the indefinite article in your readings.
Acronyms beginning with the letter “U” are not a good example, and I shouldn’t have used it, because the preferred pronunciation in English for such acronyms is almost always with /yu/, even though English orthography could go either way. People say, /yunesko/, not /unesko/, etc.
No, he’s just demonstrating one way that two different people probably wouldn’t say it.
For what it’s worth: To an American, pronouncing the ‘H’ and saying ‘herb garden’ sounds equally ridiculous because here the word ‘Herb’ is only used as a proper noun (short for Herbert). Add to that the notion that Herb & Herbert are not especially popular names anymore and, in a modern pop-culture sense, the name Herb has a ‘goofy sitcom neighbor’ vibe to it (no offense 
).
Something else I don’t think has been mentioned: Whether & when you pronounce the indefinite article ‘a’ as the long or short vowel sound. IMO using the long sound (i.e. as in the letter ‘A’) makes it sound more formal and, well, less wrong to use it in front of a vowel sound-beginning word. Saying “A army” rather than “uh army”.
Not sure if the long or short is more prevalent in the UK, but it seems to be about 50/50 here in the US…
All’s I’ve ever heard is You See Ell A (Em Oh You Ess Eeeee).
In Notes From A Small Island, Bill Bryson claimed normalcy was coined in Britain. He didn’t provide any sources, though.
Also café, buffet and garage. But this only applies to relatively recent borrowings. French loanwords that have been in English for a long time - chowder, for example - we anglicize just as the Brits do.
If you know the difference, you should never confuse the two, but I hear things like “He’s an historian” all the time on TV from people who ought to know better. I can’t think of specific examples right offhand, but I’m referring to newscasters, politicians, History Channel presenters, and the like (and yes, they pronounce the “H”). Just like I’ve heard some TV evangelists say “Jesus disciples” instead of “Jesus’s disciples.”