Is this supposed to be a game-ender for me? I’m perfectly ok with people saying “nucular”. Indeed, my understanding of it is that military people have actually made a semantic split here, employing the orthodox pronunciation of “nuclear” for phrases like “the nuclear family” but using the “nucular” pronunciation for phrases like “nuclear weapons”, the word in the latter essentially being decomposable as “nuke-ular” in their analysis. The prescriptivists usually go ga-ga over chances to disambiguate, so they should be all for this, right?
Incidentally, no one ever argues over whether it should be “noo-clear” or “nyoo-clear”, even though that is a point on which there is much pronunciation variation as well.
Also, if you feel there’s any sort of argument to be made here for correct pronunciation to be based on spelling (which is really what this thread is all about, I suppose), you’re wrong and Merriam Webster gives a good explanation why.
Picture a big, burly, heroic looking cop leaning over a little weasly looking dude in an interrogation room. The cop say’s “You killed her, didn’t you, asshole?”
Now that’s not a question, is it? The “asshole” part says it isn’t.
Yeah. It’s syntactically in the form of a question (that is to say, it has a particular syntactic form strongly associated with asking questions), but it’s not semantically a question; it plays a different conversational role. I think most people find question marks to be orthographically necessary for all things in the syntactic form of a question, however, with the only point of difference being on whether they are also further acceptable for things not in the syntactic form of a question but which play the linguistic role of a question. The “I wonder who that is(?)” type statements, for example.
Not me! I was pointing to m-w’s little red speaker icon, which usually gives one the proper pronunciation of the defined word. And which is an invaluable tool for those who, like me, are largely educated by reading.