The (potential) snobbery is not pronouncing it “newclear”, but chastising others for their different pronunciations.
And who, pray tell, made you the arbiter of what is “proper English”? Last I heard, there was no Academy of Proper English. In fact, if anyone is wrong here, it is you. Cite.
Hey, I understand where anyrose is coming from. You grow up hearing that a word is pronounced a certain way, and never hear it pronounced any other way. To your ear and your tongue, there is only one way for the word to be pronounced. There are words that sound “wrong” to my ear as well.
In fact, the above mentioned “Febyuary” vs “February” thing – “February” sounds wrong to me and feels wierd in my mouth when I say it. Yet, that’s the way it’s spelled. Of course, our language is chock full of words that just are not pronounced the way they are spelled. Like all the freakin’ “-ight” words. And let’s not even get into regionalisms …
In conclusion, it’s not a case of “right” and “wrong”, and getting all worked up over it is silly.
I agree. Of course, I pronounce the word silly as “PER-fekt-lee RASH-un-ul”. It’s a regional quirk of my dialect, so don’t tell me I’m wrong to pronounce it that way.
Pronounce it anyway you want.
But if you want to be understood, at least try to be in the ballpark, OK?
All silliness aside, there is a reason people pronounce it “nucular”. The “kl” combination followed by a long “e” is a clumsy combination of sounds in some regional dialects and so naturally the “k” and “l” get separated. Languages adjust this way all the time. One of the defining characteristics that changed Middle English to Modern English is the “great vowel shift” when people changed the pronunciation of almost all the vowels in the language! How did this happen? Why did this happen? Why couldn’t people just pronounce everything the “correct” way? Beats me.
Again, we need a linguist here to explain the particulars of this.
I knew a guy. Actually, the second syllable had a syllabic /n/, not a vowel: /wE dnz dej/ or so.
But he was Irish. It might be normal over there.
Are you trying to make a point here?
Because if you’re claiming that pronouncing it “nucular” causes difficulty in communication, well, that’s not true. If you’re trying to suggest that everyone should speak exactly the same way, or else communication will fall apart completely, you’d get along fine with most elementary school teachers, but you’d be wrong.
I just wanted to add that ‘musculus’ is now my Word of the Day. “Wow! Look at the musculae on that one! He’s pretty muscular!” 
I doubt any explanation based on strictly phonological grounds, because no one has trouble with the exact same two syllables in “likelier” or “pricklier”. No one’s started pronouncing those “likular” and “prickular”.
Like I said, a more sensible explanation is analogy to other learned words like molecular and muscular. And Monty called me a linguist once; I’m probably the closest thing we got in this thread, anyhow.
Without getting their face slapped…
Except that it is true. To communicate effectively with all English-speakers, every listener now has to learn two different “acceptable” pronunciations for that word. A friend of mine from Boston had great difficulty understanding the directions he was given when he was in New Orleans, and yet I can’t imagine descriptivists saying that either of their pronunciations was “wrong”. Multiple acceptable pronunciations do make communication more difficult. Maybe having just the two pronunciations of “nuclear” doesn’t cause confusion, but it makes the language sloppy. Likewise “EE-ther” and “EYE-ther”, “ANT” and “ONT”, and so on. Which ones are acceptable regional differences? To accept all differences in speech as “acceptable regionalisms” is ridiculous.
I don’t expect everyone to speak exactly the same; I realize that regional variations in words are to be expected and can’t be stopped. And I doubt that communication will fall apart completely. For the informal use of the language, I don’t care if you use words like “ain’t” and “y’all” and even “nukyuler”. But when making an attempt to communicate with an audience, the burden of conformity is on the speaker. When making a speech which will be translated into other languages, it’s only polite to stick to standard pronunciations, so that non-native English speakers will understand each word.
My name is Jurph and I’m a prescriptivist. You’re not going to convince me that descriptivism is right, and I doubt aisle ever convince ewe that your rong.
The two pronunciations of “aunt” are acceptable regional differences, as there is a regional characteristic to their distribution (though social factors matter as well - many black people around here seem to pronounce “ant” and “aunt” differently, but most white people don’t.) I’m not aware of any particular regional distribution of “nucular” or either form of “either”, so I wouldn’t call those “regionalisms”.
Sure. But to accept all regionalisms as “acceptable regionalisms” makes perfect sense. I know that this idea comes as an enormous shock to people who don’t know anything about language, but some of us study the use of language scientifically, and believe it or not, it’s possible for a middle ground to exist between your imagined situation in which everyone makes up their own language and some central standard being mandated from above.
And as evidence of this, look at the extant variation in every language community. It’s not like prescriptivist tirades about how we pronounce “February” have had any impact. Regional variation exists; it’s not going anywhere, and it hasn’t stopped us from communicating just fine.
This silliness solves a problem that never existed. No one is puzzled by these regionalisms. The functions that language is put to - communication between people - in themselves insure that a single community’s speech won’t diverge too far. Pretending that the two pronunciations of “apricot” herald some complete dissolution of the English language ignores everything we know about language and history. None of these arguments for prescriptivism have any validity; we can tell that because people actually study language (seriously!) and we know how language communities diverge and split.
My dream world is one in which people at very least approach language from the viewpoint of a rational examination of a phenomenon rather than bringing in the superstitions they were taught by incompetent schoolteachers (and I trust I don’t need to reiterate the long list of rules of “proper English” that everyone knows, no one has ever followed, and were invented whole cloth with no basis in usage or logic. Everyone’s heard me do that before.)
I think a lot of people simply don’t believe or understand that language can be studied and understood in a scientific manner. Linguists tend to roll our eyes at prescriptive rulemaking because none of the arguments made to support it are valid. Many prescriptions have never been the norm of any community of English speakers. There is obviously no need for them, since we seem to communicate with little difficulty despite the fact that very few people actually change their pronunciation of words to match some supposed standard anyway.
What pisses me off, though, is the arbitrary choice to elevate one’s own variety to “standard” and denigrate the way other communities talk as “incorrect”. Since, as has been mentioned, there is no standardizing body for American English, what business is it of yours to decide that the way you talk is the “acceptable standard” and that deviations from that are incorrect? On a slightly larger scale, that’s what prescription is: it’s setting a certain variety of speech - the variety spoken by a particular elite - as the standard to be aspired to, and irrationally marking other varieties as wrong. Black English (f’rinstance) is, according to the prescriptivists, “nonstandard” and “incorrect”, even though no valid logical basis can be made to claim that it’s any less capable of the tasks language is put to. The choice of one variety of English as “proper English” is in large part just another facet of a broader effort to denigrate certain groups of people.
That’s the general concensus. In fact, some people probably make a point to pronounce it that way because it sounds more “technical”, being in line with other scientific terms.
I think I’m guitly of that, too. Much as my spine crawls when I hear “nukyular”, it’s just one of those things that you can’t fight.
I’m not claiming I particularly like hearing it myself. But I don’t pretend that my own irrational hatreds are aspects of some larger truth.
Hey, wait, let’s do this in other areas! From now on, brussels sprouts are a non-standard vegetable. You can eat them in your own home among family if you must, but please don’t use them in public where children and foreigners might be confused about what constitutes proper vegetables. We need standards for our vegetables - otherwise, people will start eating grass and stinging nettles and they won’t know any better!
Nukuler, nucular, nukyular… jeebus, people, we can’t even agree on how to misspell it, and it’s printed right there in thread title!
Yeah, Anyrose. I feel for you. I agree. It bugs me nuts, too, but I have learned that arguing it is a lost cause. I was you here a while back in a “discussion” over whether or not “irregardless” is a word. It still isn’t, but I lost that one, too.
I get that language changes and regions vary, and I like new words. There’s just something about taking a word that is perfectly good on it’s own and raping it for no good reason. "Irregardless is a good example of this. The (in my mind) right way to convey the idea of that word is to say “irrespective”. “Irregardless” is just as long a word, and doesn’t add anything. It just doesn’t bring anything to the table. Instead, it is a made up union of prefix and actual word that sort of sounds like what you actually mean, and has become accepted as a term, because its use spread quickly by people who didn’t know any better and was never nipped in the bud. Now it’s too late.
I’m going to get a tee shirt printed up that says,
“I give up. It’s NUCULAR.”
On review, Excalibure’s point is exactly why the argument will never be won.
Clearly, I am out of my league to come up with an argument against it.
My prejudiced ears will always make a knee-jerk determination as to what sounds ignorant and uneducated, though. I have no clue how I would ever change that.
the difference between “eether/eyether”, “tomayto/tomahto” is not the same thing as “nucular/nuclear”. In the first two, the syllables are in the correct order and it is regional dialect (or social upbringing) that colors the pronunciation. Not so with my pet peeve. and FTR I understand why “unedumacated” folks say it that way, but that they do it should not make it acceptable. To me it is indicitive of the breakdown of the educational system. When I was in school, in the 60’s and 70’s, our English teachers took great pains to teach us proper pronunciations. Today the teachers hands are tied by oversized classes, unruly students, and overly sensitive parents who view every little lesson plan as a potential warper of minds.
:rolleyes: Speaking of uneducated, how about you educate yourself on the relative educational levels of modern students and the students when you were a kid? Or maybe you should educate yourself on the illustrious history of old fogeys glorifying their own upbringing while condemning the way that kids today are raised? You can trace that shit back for thousands of years. It’s just as absurd today as it was in ancient Greece.
Daniel
The bottom line is that the GWB pronunciation of the word makes the speaker sound illiterate. It sounds close, so the listener knows what word the speaker is trying to say, but it’s not the way the word reads.
I know, I know . . . colonel, February, Wednesday . . . these words do present an interesting problem with my first statement. Perhaps it’s that, for some reason, these words were mispronounced so often and for so long that the mispronunciation became the norm, but that’s not the case with GWB’s nuclear. In today’s day and age when a Yale/Harvard grad says “nyukular,” odds are he’s affecting his speach to sound “common (i.e. less literate).” It has nothing to do with regionalities – the guy was born in Connecticut for Pete’s sake.
As to the allusion that certain forms of English (specifically ebonics and let’s include hillbilly/redneck dialects so as to avoid any suggestions of racism) are just as acceptable for communication – wake up – communicating at the playground maybe but do that shit in a work environment (unless it’s SO-SO DEF records or the set of Hee-Haw) and you’re out on your can. So then the question becomes, when is a certain pronunication pattern appropriate – I would suggest that the illiterate-sounding nyukular isn’t appropriate for a state of the union address. YMMV
noatimean’ yo?
I ain’t saying the N-word no more. I’m just gonna say “atomic”. It’s one New Year’s resolution I can take past Bowl Week.