This apparently agrees with your view, but I find it a bit silly for a site that tries to be some form of authority on English etymology to refer to any word being “misused” in the same way for 350 years.
Dictionary.com says this meaning developed in the 19th century.
No, that isn’t what I said. I was pointing out that one person could say they pronounced the letters out of order - wendz-day - and another person could say they pronounced them in order with a silent letter - wenz-day. And both of them would essentially be pronouncing the word the same way.
It apparently goes back a long way. It fell out of use and then rose again on the West Coast (and Australia, among other places).
Elizabeth Brayer’s George Eastman: A Biography talks about “[Eastman’s] Upstate New York accent, (nasal, twangy, harsh-voweled, ending each sentence on the up-beat as if asking a question)…”
Regionalisms and dialects. You don’t have to like them.
No, the point is that /d/ is not phonemic in that position, as its absence does not change the meaning of the word. Consonant clusters often end up with the least significant phoneme being made silent. And there is no pronunciation difference between a word with a silent /d/ and the same word without that silent letter.
Why “old-timers”; is this something you’ve only heard old people say? It bugs me a little, too, but I always assumed it was characteristic of a rural western-Midwestern accent, e.g. Kansas.
For me, as a denizen of L.A., they’re kind of the same thing. When I drove taxi, the seniors of Mid-Wilshire and Fairfax who used the coupons from LADOT to pay fare for getting to the supermarkets were almost always from the Midwest. They were always telling me about the old L.A. they found when they first moved out, and pronouncing things that way.
I have a 1979 edition print dictionary (Scott, Forseman Advanced) and the first pronunciation listed for every day of the week is -dee, not -day. Get a dictionary from the '60s, and it may not have the second (-day) pronunciation.
I blame Alton Brown and the Food Network’s lack of fact checking (looking up pronunciations) for making people think plantain’s second syllable rhymes with rain and the x in astaxanthin isn’t pronounced like a z.
This is an extremely silly argument. As I said, you have an example in Weddenzday. It’s fatuous to say that Wenzday has a swapped letter because you can’t tell the difference between Wenzday and Wendzday. All that means is that Wendzday doesn’t exist in our dialect.
I don’t know what guidelines that dictionary has, but Merriam-Webster has for years stated that the first pronunciation in their dictionary is not to be considered the “preferred” pronunciation–just that in a list, something has to come first. I think they implicitly show “alternate” pronunciations with also, or mark it with an obelus to indicate that some people frown on it.
Your argument seems to be that my way is identical to his way but my way is right and his way is wrong.
If there’s no difference between Wenzday and Wendzday, how do you know it’s Wendzday that doesn’t exist? Maybe Wenzday doesn’t exist and you’ve been pronouncing it Wendzday all these years without realizing it. Seems unlikely, but you’re claiming other people are somehow pronouncing a different word then what they think they are.
Personally, I think some people think they’re pronouncing Wenzday and some people think they’re pronouncing Wendzday. And the two pronunciations end up being indistinguishable from each other.
I do agree with you that it’s an extremely silly argument.
Huh. You learn something new every day (and it’s ten minutes past midnight where I’m at, so I got it out of the way early today). I’ve been pronouncing plantains wrong all these years (fortunately it’s not a word I say out loud very often so it’s been mostly a mental error).
Fortunately, I had never heard of the word astaxanthin before today, so I’m guilt-free on that one. And having now learned not only that astaxanthin is pronounced with a z but also that it’s a chemical compound which gives some plants and animals a reddish color and is an antioxidant, I’m all set for Sunday as well and now my brain can take the weekend off.
Asta- is a prefix hooked onto the root word xanthin, hence the z sound. I just figured if “Good Eats” was going to be all sciencey, they could at least look up some of the science words. Oligosaccharide and arthropod are two others they butchered. (pun not intended, but maybe appropriate)
Two of my pet peeves: “lugxury” for luxury; and “egxit” for exit.
Another thing, which may be a regionalism and/or a Britishism; taking words that end in -a and making them end in -ar. For instance, idea becomes “idear”, and peninsula becomes “peninsular.”
And one of the oddest of all–I’ve heard one particular person on the radio who seemingly cannot pronounce “hurricane” to save his life. He says “hurricun.”
