Ah, that’s clever!
In retrospect, I see the same slyness in your previous post. :smack:
(Additional clue: key-ho-teak instead of key-ho-tick.)
Yes, but dictionaries were already wide spread. My point was not that the change is something that has happened since the internet, or even within my lifetime, that was just one example of a way in which “standardizations” are available to the masses. I think that as soon as the public at large became literate, printing presses were common, and dictionaries came into being, then a lot of that sort of spelling/pronunciation shift became less justifiable. (And the mispronunciation of “sherbet” has bothered me since I was a child, like… in the early 1980s, so I know it’s not “since the internet”. )
I think it should be pronounced chaotic.
Speaking of linguistic stuff, I’m studying Chinese, and a few months back, we learned that the word for Alcohol is “Jiu” (I might be spelling it wrong), and the character is 酒. The word for a bar is “Jiuba”, written as 酒吧. It was only a few weeks ago that I remembered that the “ba” from “Jiuba” is the same ba used as a grammatical marker for a sentence being used as a suggestion (ie: “Go fix your necktie ba” or “Ask her out already ba”).
Thus, the Chinese word for a bar is literally a suggestion of alcohol. 酒吧. :smack: 
(If you see question marks or boxes sprinkled throughout my post, it’s because I’m including the Hanzi characters for illustration, and you very well might not all have eastern language support enabled on your computers).
New Rule: For “ridiculously obvious stuff” , it has to be about things an average person without a Ph.D. in the subject would get. The above is NOT an example of this 
To be fair, a good 9 million+ Chinese would probably put that at “ridiculously obvious”, PhD or no. 
Speaking of linguistic stuff, language evolving, and so forth, it’d totally warm my heart if someone posted to this thread, in response to the title, “You know, it just struck me, there’s no great reason why people should be expected to maintain hidebound deference to the ways previous generations spoke.” That and the myriad other such revelations about speaking/writing correctly which occasionally, but unfortunately infrequently, happen.
Sorry for the hijack. Here’s a more on-topic post: I didn’t just get it, I realized it probably in high school or so, but for ages, I thought “misled” was the past tense of a verb “misle”, whose meaning was… well, its meaning was “mislead”, though I never thought of it in specifically those terms until the day enlightenment dawned upon me. The funny thing is, several other times, I’ve run into others who experienced the same thing; about a month ago, I discovered that one of my friends was still laboring under the misconception, in fact!
I think a large number of people are using this thread as a way to say “look how clever I am for figuring this out! And I’m so smart that I’m going to pretend that this is something I’d normally consider to be “obvious” and therefore I’m pretending to be shocked that I didn’t get it sooner.”
At least that’s how a lot of it it has come across to me. Mind you, I’ve found a lot of it quite interesting, and all that.
‘The City of Brotherly Love’ is not a random, slightly ill-fitting nickname for the city of Philadelphia. It’s just a translation.
It took me three semesters of ancient Greek to realize that.
I’m from Philadelphia.
Chill out, dude. And stay on topic.
I never said (or implied) that noone says or spells the word sherbert. I just called you on your highly subjective claim that “sherbert” flows better than “sherbet.” People pronounce words the way they learn them from parents, peers, and teachers. Once a critical mass is reached in a “mispronunciation” it becomes an acceptable alternative, and eventually may become the preferred pronunciation.
I object to people taking such a word in transition and making up reasons why the new pronunciation is “right” and “better.” I disagree that “sherbert” is easier to say or flows better than “sherbet.” You just find it that way because that’s how you learned it and it’s what you like. To someone like me that learned it as “sherbet,” that is the pronunciation that’s easy to say and flows nicely.
Now go have a nice bowl of sherbet and calm down
:eek: :smack:
I guess subtlety is lost on you. Or more likely I’m just not good at it. I was alluding to the two correct pronunciations of homage and homage, another foreign word which has changed once it became part of the English language. Foreign words are borrowed by the English language. They change over the years. It has been that way since Athelred and Fizzlebert decided to create the English language after a couple of pints. I’m not sure why people decide to take the spit in the ocean approach to evolving language. I am chilled to the correct temperature. And I don’t think I have anything more I can say about the subject other than to point out that one of the pinatas in Viva Pinata is called a sherbat.
Much as it pains me to do it, I’ve requested that this thread be closed because I’m tired of the bickering.
Closed at the request of the OP.