When I hear people calling into a radio show to complain about how schools and teachers aren’t teaching their students proper grammar and spelling…
And then those same callers use words and phrases like ‘pronunciate’, ‘currentness’, and ‘a urbanization’.
It really does make me laugh.
E.
About a year ago, I heard a similar thing on the radio.
The caller used the word(?) “conversate”.
yea-aaah… riii-iiight…
I ran into someone I went to school with, and whose career I have envied ever since.
I asked what she was doing these days and she said she went on TV news magazine shows and wrote newspaper articles … she said “I’m a pundint.”
Well, it sounds like they have good cause to complain; their own education was apparently insufficient to keep them from sounding like uneducated fools to some.
Although I’m not sure what your complaint is about “urbanization,” it’s right here in my trusty OED with a quotation from 1888.
“Currentness” does sound a bit funny to my ear, and is listed as “rare or obsolete” but has a history going back to 1583.
“Pronunciate” is of course completely wrong in the context I’m sure they used it; it is either an adjective, “as announced/foretold,” recorded usage in 1432, or a verb meaning “to announce,” from 1652. Both of these uses are quite obsolete.
-Sengkelat the pedantic bastardOops, I misread your post. “a urbanization” does sound quite, quite wrong.
I had one of my employees yesterday complainig to me about her son’s teacher, and she insisted that her son was doing pacifically what the teacher wanted him to do, but wasn’t getting proper credit for it.
I admit, I was baffled.
Yep, that’s what I was bitching about - (about what I was bitching, if we’re being pedantic 
). The guy said “We’re seeing a urbanization of language.”
:smack:
And yes, pronunciate was completely incorrect in the way that the caller used it. She was talking about how her son took a class in Russian and had to take a grammar class to learn how to ‘pronunciate’ the Russian alphabet and Russian words. I was really waiting for my head to explode after that one.
I listen to this radio show every day when I go out to get lunch, and I have to admit, while it’s completely opposite from my political beliefs (the show is very conservative; I’m so liberal, even the Democrats don’t want to claim me sometimes), the host cracks me up and I like him a lot. You can almost hear him rolling his eyes at some of the people who call in.
E.
I wonder if she could be related to my mother, who says she hangs her clothes in the “closent.”