It “sounded” like no such thing. Unless you have one of those text reader thingees. Then it probably sounded rather robotic.
Perhaps I was not clear. These pronounciations grated in my hearing. I know about accents. I’ve read things written in dialect, including Dickens. I watch TV shows where people speak with thick accents and use regionalisms in character. And you know what? Those people sound funny to me, just a I sound funny to other people not from The Bronx.
And ‘irreplaceaboo’ is not acceptable in any context.
I’ll note that singing often results in modified pronunciation. Classical singers are even trained on how to change their pronunciations in order to have the best effect.
With regard to “Irreplaceable,” to me it sounds like she’s saying “IrreplaceaBOW” to rhyme with “what didja think I was puttin’ you out FOW.”
The mispronunciations that bug me are from actors. Apparently they’re guessing at how to pronounce written words and nobody is correcting them. Examples: All throughout the movie Space Cowboys, the diphthong in “Project Daedalus” was mispronounced with a long A instead of a short e. In Breaking Bad last season, Colin Hanks repeatedly mispronounced “omega”, with a short e instead of a long A sound in the middle syllable, though his character was supposed to be well educated.
Two I particularly hate are “calvary” when someone means “cavalry” (the first is where Jesus was crucified, the second is Custer’s branch of the Army), and “short- (or long-) lived,” with a short, not long, “i.”
You are short- or long-lived if your life is short or long, not your “liv” (if you even have one, which I doubt you do).
I also loathe hearing “further” when the speaker clearly means “farther.” Apparently they don’t bother teaching the difference between the two even in journalism school nowadays.
And “loathe,” BTW, is not interchangeable with “loth.” The first is a verb (“I loathe you!”), the second is an adjective (“I am loth to close.” —A. Lincoln). They’re not spelled the same, and they’re not pronounced the same.
You are short or long lived if you have lived a short or long time. I’d say “live” the verb past tense is more accurately pronounced with the short i. So that pronunciation doesn’t seem very off. Saying -ble like boo is odder, but yes, singing pronunciation is often mangled a bit to make it fit the music and tempo. Singers put the accent on the VREE syllable in “everything” sometimes, which no one would do in spoken English.
And there is also the now more common spelling of “loath.” Loth is given as an alternate spelling in dictionaries, to be sure, but this is a spectacularly bad example to use for “correctness” in language. N-grams shows that loth has been waning in usage for a century.
No, something is long-lived (with a long “i”) if its life is long, just like someone would be “knifed” (with a long “i”) and not “kniffed” (with a short “i”) if he/she had a knife stuck in them.
“Lived” is in this case an adjective (a past passive participle, actually), not a verb.
Another mispronunciation annoyance for me is in the Natasha Bedingfield song “Unwritten”; she pronounces “lips” as “lisp,” e. g." No one else, no one else; Can speak the words on your lisp…"
There have been a number of threads on “most annoying pronunciation in song lyrics”. My personal (least) favourite is Tom Cochrane in the song White Hot pronouncing “Somalian” as if it rhymed with “summer lion”.
Quite true. But if you change the spelling, you change the pronunciation. That a word is commonly misused is often offered as justification for mangling the language.
Granted, the word is not widely used nowadays (I suspect it was considered literary even by the 1860s). But Lincoln did not say “I am loath (rhymes with “oath”) to close,” but “I am loth (rhymes with “sloth”) to close.”
As for “correctness,” I happen to work as both a translator and editor, and I used to teach English as a foreign language. So you bet I know my native tongue backward and forward.
Age might have something to do with it bothering you more now. I’ve noticed I have to pay more attention to make sure I’m hearing correctly now. If your hearing has changed enough so that you have to listen more closely, but not enough to make you think you have a hearing problem, you’ll notice the alternate/mispronunciations more, and they will be more annoying.
This particular point is gibberish. It’s not “kniffed” because “knif” isn’t a word. You live a life. You don’t knif a knife.
If it is supposed to be a long i, one would assume it should be long-lifed, not long-lived. I will continue using the short i version because I find none of your arguments compelling.
Not historically accurate. The spelling often changes to follow the pronunciation.
Only by prescriptivists. And nobody pays attention to them.
How do you know that? Wouldn’t he have used the long “o” to make the assonance with “close” stronger? And even if true, if rhymes with oath is the preferred pronunciation today - which it is - what difference could it possibly make?
And I’ve been a professional writer, editor, and critic for 40 years. But I didn’t know anything about usage until I studied it as a separate subject. That study convinced me that being a prescriptivist was insupportable by facts or history. There is certainly good English, which I always define here as the English used by professional communicators. But that even professional communicators never agree on anything unanimously has been indisputable since the American Heritage Dictionary’s first word usage panel back in 1966. You are certainly free to hold yourself to standards of what you consider good English in your work, as I feel that I do in mine. But virtually every discrepancy between those two visions is arbitrary and personal and has nothing to do with “correctness.” That’s a myth.