I guess the connotation I’m seeing is that anything a person does professionally is going to be something they do better than the average person.
If we were talking about a medical issue on this board, for example, and somebody posted “I’m a physician and here’s the information” we would assume he’s right. We’re not saying that his medical knowledge is necessarily extraordinary among physicians but even if he’s just an average physician, his medical knowledge is extraordinary among us. Medicine is his metier.
That is just sad, that is. That pronunciation sounds straight up hillbilly (NTTAWHBs). The dictionary on this here device has three pronunciations listed, such as rhyme with “rich”, “leash” and “wish”, but when you play the audio, it gives the first one of those.
You remind me of an old TV commercial–can’t remember what for–with a pretentious woman trying on dresses and putting on airs in a high-end boutique. She asks the clerk, “Don’t you have something more…flam-bwah-yahn?” And the clerk, looking down her nose, replies drily, “Oh, you mean flam-BOY-ant?”
One syllable used to be the British pronunciation too until the mispronunciation with two became standard. The word is from the French fort, strong. OED also has a dig at the feminine form which is used. “As in many other adoptions of French adjectives used as nouns, the feminine form has been ignorantly substituted for the masculine; compare locale, morale (of an army), etc.”.
