“triggered by” might be a bit dismissive.
I can understand why some might not want to use a chart to figure out what they are trying to say if it is not part of their day to day activities.
I suspect that among people in the field, using IPA is just as natural as jazz musicians using shorthand for various chord flavors amongst themselves. And it provides a substantial degree of precision over homebrew methods. But it should be easy to see why many would shy away from it.
I’m surprised it took 19 posts for that to be mentioned.
I’m not in the least “triggered” by IPA and I acknowledge that it’s a useful tool, but since this is a general interest message board and not a club for professional linguists, there’s no way everyone is going to know it, or want to take the time to learn it.
Luckily, we have tools accessible to all to help with discussions like this one, regardless of IPA facility.
As for me, I put myself in the “spear” camp and voted accordingly, but listening to the above, it sounds just fine to me even though she’s saying “spare.” Saying it both ways, I realize they sound very similar in natural speech, so the pronunciation variations are not the huge divide I thought they must be when I read the OP.
I don’t know if I’d describe it a ‘huge divide’; I mean, I’m well aware that there are differing regional pronunciations, and there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ (though we all secretly think our accent is the ‘correct’ one, or that we have no accent at all 
).
But ‘ex-SPEAR-i-mint’ does sound a bit odd to me, and I hadn’t been aware of hearing that pronunciation until fairly recently. So as I mentioned in my OP, I was just wondering whether it was a regional or generational thing.
Well, that’s true, and I apologize for that wording.
But there really is no other way to discuss regional pronunciations without doing the whole These-Words-Rhyme-No-They-Don’t-Yes-They-Do back and forth.
Education is an ever increasingly rare commodity.
And that chart is chock full of technical terms that aren’t going to be meaningful to the kind of people who are “triggered by” IPA.
How does this relate to people pronouncing a relatively common word in more than one way?
Same. SPERR, not SPARE or SPEAR.
NYC here, we do not have the Mary-merry-marry merger and all three are pronounced differently.
Yeah, I didn’t quite get Jasmine’s meaning there either.
I’ve said it out loud about ten times now and it comes out either ex-SPARE-i-ment or ex-SPEAR-i-ment or somewhere in between. Midwesterner who speaks with the General American Accent (I think*).
*My research says that, geographically, the General American fizzles out in Western Illinois. I’m from Central Illinois. As far as I can tell my accent is no different from that of newscasters, etc. But a cunning linguist may be able to tell a difference.
SPARE here. And I’m glad there’s a poll.
And MARY, MERRY, and MARRY are all pronounced the same. I come from Upstate New York.
Admittedly that’s not how it’s spelled, so I won’t defend it as “correct”.
So you follow up my and @Thudlow_Boink 's questions as to the exact meaning of your original post with another head-scratcher: ‘My God, I stand corrected!’ with a link to the British pronunciation of ‘experiment’. Am I missing a joke or cultural reference here?
I like you Jasmine, but you can be a bit oblique at times.
True, though Sheldon also intentionally affected a non-Texas accent, in an effort to not sound like a hick; I recently watched an old episode of TBBT, in which Sheldon claimed to have intentionally adopted a Mid-Atlantic accent – whatever his accent is, it’s not that, but he clearly has some particular and unusual pronunciations.
At any rate, I pronounce the word ex-SPAIR-ih-ment; the second syllable rhymes with “air.” I’m from Great Lakes region.
I am from Mary-merry-marry merger land, and I usually say ex-SPARE-uh-ment, but I do sometimes say ex-SPEAR-uh ment. And sometimes the second vowel is even closer to the vowel in “pet.” It’s all over the place with me, depending on the phase of the moon, or something.
Spear. I’m not a young Millennial or Gen Z.
I pronounce it “al-EWE-min-ee-um”.
Stranger
Yeah, I distinguish merry/mary/marry, so I can’t vote in the poll, since they are both wrong to my ear. Oh, there’s a “something else”, I guess that’s my vote.
