Italics mine
Guizot please tell me that this is post ironic humour to ilustrate your point ?
Seeing as how I have only seen the word “chipotle” in frint five or six times, and I’ve NEVER had occasion to try to SAY it…I might recommend waiting to drop the hammer on that one until it’s in as common use as “nuclear” and “library.”
I’d like to throw in my $.08 for “mischievous.” It’s MISS-chiv-us, not miss-CHEE-vee-us.
Mischievous
NOT
Mischievious
THANK YOU.
If I recall the Will Safire column about “nucular” correctly, Jimmy Carter, and I believe Lyndon Johnson both said “nucular”.
It has very little to do with actual intelligence, but is more related to certain linguistic issues. It was hashed out a bit in the thread that Liberal linked to.
Here’s some explanation of why people do it. . .
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001999.html
It may not be related to intelligence, but habitual mispronunciation of words like “nuclear” (not to mention other oddments like continually misspelling “their” as “thier” reflects a stubborn, willful carelessness and/or affectation that reflects poorly on the user.
If you’re the Prez and heard on a global basis, get this right or risk being labeled a clueless hick. Appearances do count for something.
And you’re all wrong. It’s pronounced “uh-tom-ick”.
Liar.
Hey, Bugs Bunny pronounces it that way. And if it’s good enough for Bugs, it’s good enough for me.
Or it reflects that the listener doesn’t understand the real issues behind the mispronunciation.
Setting the bar a little low on the definition of “bashing”, aren’t you Unc? Even for Reeder, that was pretty tame.
Actually, it gives no fewer than three pronunciations.
- ::: d & r ::: *
Not so. Spoken language affectations are pretty much locked in by the teenage years, and it can be very difficult to even realize you’re pronouncing a word differently from standard, much less change it. Someone, especially someone like Bush who is not an actor and not even that great of a public speaker, has enough trouble without trying to fix his own pronunciation. More than likely it’d come off as stilted and unnatural, which goes counter to his good ol’ boy image.
Writing, on the other hand, is a taught thing, must be consciously done, and there is only one right way to spell a particular word. Not to mention that you can see what you’ve written and proofread it before others see it, whereas once you’ve made a slip in speech, it’s out there and can’t be deleted. It’s incorrect to lump a regional pronunciation and a spelling error together as “willful carelessness.”
I bet you anything Bush spells it “nuclear” despite how he pronounces it. (I’ll pass on the cheap shot here, as tempting as it is.) Of all the things Bush does to get worked up over, this rates the highest on my Mehometer.
Do you pronounce that MEH-oh-meet-er or meh-AH-meh-ter?
Actually, I pronounce it Throatwarbler Mangrove.
Mebbe I am; that just happened to be an example I could quickly locate. But, we’ve all seen Reeder’s limbo act; he’s “bashed” Bush any number of petty things. And I ain’t letting him off the hook for making false statements now.
Lots of Southerners pronounce “nuclear” correctly. A bunch of Northerners go nukular. Once you know you’re making a mistake like this and have a world audience, continuing to make it says “I don’t give a rat’s ass how dumb I sound” and/or “It’s part of my regular guy charm.”
On the other hand, the most accepted spelling of my username has only one “n”, so my glass house is a little vulnerable. 
I’m not sure what cheap shot you passed on, but for me, one of the problems of having Dubya in charge is that he SEEMS to be sort of dim. And one thing that gives that impression is the fact that he apparently spells or writes NOTHING. I imagine that his people are painfully aware of his inarticulateness (look at all the Bushisms that we’ve all heard and read), so that they script just about everything they can. And as for the man, himself, I do wonder if he can spell nuclear. In fact, in my view, folks who don’t think well can not speak well, nor can they write well. Language must be an expression of thought at some level, and for us to have a leader who appears to do neither is a shame. And if I agreed with his politics I’d still feel the same way. He’s not a terribly bright man, I’m convinced - partly on the basis of how he sounds. Yes, for some of us, it does reflect poorly on the man.
xo, C.
Yes, but the fact that some people do and some people don’t doesn’t mean it can be turned on and off like a light switch.
I don’t know about that. I’m a terrible public speaker, but I like to think I’m adept at writing.
I don’t have a high opinion of Bush myself, but I have to think he can at least spell nuclear with enough concentration and maybe a handler coaching him beforehand. (Okay, so I couldn’t pass up the cheap shot in the end.)
Yeah, I remember it, too. He cited words like “muscular” as fitting the English pattern of sounds that leads people to say nu-kyu-lar. We also typically say lar-nix, not lar-inx for “larynx”. And, of course, I’ll ask the OP how he pronounces the day of the week from two days ago. You know, Wednesday.
My skin crawls everytime I hear nu-kyu-lar, but it’s a common pronunciation, and we just have to learn to live with it. There are plenty of similarly mispronounced words that don’t bother anyone.
Nothing wrong with pronouncing it “nucular”, IMHO. See further past disussion in the link.
Okay.
It’s post ironic humour…Is that better now?
(Actually it’s just a styuupid error at 2:00am.)
And what is “post ironic” again?
Wow. I can’t believe it to see Nunberg actually talking about something other than lexicon. On the radio, all he does is drone on and on and on about the most obvious things of popular word choice. (“Tell us again, Geof: Why do we pull down our pants when we go to the bathroom? Is that so? You must really be a linguist.”)
He makes a good point, though, that it’s probably not about metathesis. Maybe I will read his book after all.