– for free –
No, no, no.
It comes to you free,
or for nothing,
but you don’t get it for free.
I knew someone who always said “the human cry”, when he meant “hue and cry”. It was annoying but amusing.
The variations on “prima donna” just kill me. When an employee wrote “pre madonna” in a memo to me, I just had to ask him if he was referring to Diana Ross. I got a blank look.
And actually, it’s hew and cry.
Wow, teach me to be smart.
I would have laid down good money on it being hew and cry.
Nothing to see here.
Then I don’t think you know too many U.S. liberals. I don’t know a single liberal who’d keep a gun, for any reason.
Daniel
Excalibre
Would you say the word “mischievous” came first on paper or as a spoken word?
If spoken first why wouldn’t it be spelled as you say it was supposedly originally pronounced(mis-chee-vee-us)? After all we have “previous” and “devious.”
You am not getting it are you?
I wonder how many times I have annoyed folks in my life by referring to a beginner’s textbook on a subject as a “primer”, spoken like paint primer.
It wasn’t until a year ago that I found that the word rhymes with “simmer”.
Slight tangent…
I normally don’t mind funky pronunciation of foreign place names if they are the accepted proper English pronunciation of the name. We don’t say Lisboa, we say Lisbon – they don’t say London, they say Londres. Fine.
However, it drives me nuts when I hear a news reporter pronounce São Paulo as “Sow Pollo”, even though that may be the accepted English pronunciation.
The absolute best part of this post is the accent marks you chose to use. In French, that accent over the “e” signifies that the “e” is to be pronounced as “ay.” When “forte” is written “forte” (no accent), yes, a French speaker would pronounce it “fort.” But when the accent is there (aigu? I forget - never could keep them accent names straight), as in “forté,” absolutely French speakers would pronounce it “fortay” because the accent tell them too.
On the forte issue, from m-w (who I trust a lot more than Dictionary.com, for whatever reason.)
To sum up:
It is indeed a French word.
The French pronounce it closer to “for” than “fort” so we can’t even claim that pronouncing it “fort” is adhering to its French origins.
All are standard.
No matter which you say (except maybe “for”) anyone familiar with the word will very likely know what you mean.
But isn’t forte one of those words, like niche*, that if you pronounce it right people look at you funny and don’t understand you?
*A professor at my university insisted this was pronounced neesh and not nitch. I just try not to use the word.
Oh, I get it. I have participated in more discussions here than I care to admit about linguistic prescriptivism. I also read books on linguistics and take classes in it - I’ve heard the arguments before and I’ll hear them again.
It doesn’t matter what the original form of “mischievous” was, because language forms change. Constantly. And if you decide to base your speech upon the “purer” forms of generations past, all that will happen is that you won’t be understood by anyone living. There’s no value in setting up old forms of language as some sort of idol; there just ain’t nuthin’ special about whatever form the word “mischievous” took hundreds of years ago.
I imagine you wouldn’t like this standard to be applied evenly, either - otherwise, I might use such old forms as “ax” for “ask”, or “ain’t”, or double negatives, or end present participles with “-in” rather than “-ing”. And I might confuse “fewer” and “less”. “Ax” and “ask” are attested from around the same period (making them equal according to your criterion), but in all the other cases I listed, the “correct” form is the newer one, and the older, and thus “purer”, form is now the deprecated one.
So either you have to find another reason besides which form is older to justify your claims that “mischievous” is correct and “mischievious” isn’t, or else (to avoid the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy) start using the other old forms that your fourth-grade teacher would have smacked you for.
My third grade teacher enlightened me as to the pronunciation of mischievous, thank you.
Excalibre
I suppose this might be true if we had two or three hundred year lifespans.
Says who? You?
Well, the fact that I was right is in my favor. 
But you gave up; frankly, you didn’t manage to hold your own. And you gave up when it became obvious that you didn’t have anything else to say.
I’m giving up on you, but that doesn’t mean you “win”.
Well, come to West By God and I’ll introduce you to plenty.
Back to the topic…
I was dragooned into attending a home decor party and the hostess kept telling us that whatever Godawful decoration she was selling would become “The vocal point of the room.”
This is precisely the argument I used in a thread as to why “noo-kyoo-lar” is an incorrect pronunciation of nuclear. The word was spelled the way it was to correspond to the way it is pronounced. According to the sounds that are assigned to individual letters, which most of us agree on, the pronunciation “noo-klee-ar” leads logically to the sequence of letters n-u-c-l-e-a-r. If “noo-kyoo-lar” were a legitimate pronunciation, it would have been spelled in such a way as to produce that sound.
Where do you get this little pearl? “Ain’t” is used in a virtually limitless variety of constructions in which not even the most ignorant, illiterate rube would say it means “am not.” He ain’t, they ain’t, we ain’t, it ain’t, these ain’t, those ain’t…
Again, according to you. There were quite a few others in that thread (the majority, if I’m not mistaken) who don’t see it that way.
And not having anything else to say is not the same as giving up. I had my position, I presented it as clearly as I could, you didn’t agree, we all got on with our lives. Why keep saying the same things over and over? I see far too much of that on these boards and it gets boring. The length of many of these threads (on topics many and varied, not just on grammar) could be a fraction of what they end up being.