Tom Mangan’s home page
A newsman’s life in the valley of silicon
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What I do
| Abide in San Jose, California.
| Accompany one wife, one cat.
| Work at the San Jose Mercury News.
| Blog for fun.
(Latest attempt: CatStockBlog.com)| Hike for exercise.
| Read the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly.
| Watch movies from Netflix.
| Listen to tunes on XM Satellite Radio.
| Drive to the mountains and the sea in my Honda Element.
March 29th, 2004 at 10:29 am
I really enjoyed Language Hat’s refutation of this list here.
Even for those who believe in the concept of “mispronunciation” (by native speakers), this list is useless, because its few worthwhile nuggets (words whose “wrong” pronunciations will actually make many people think less of you: Calvary, escape, et cetera, &c) are easily found elsewhere and are drowned in a sea of natural variants whose subtle difference easily escapes notice. …
Also goes into an interesting conversation on language descriptivism vs. prescriptivism that those of us who complain about dictionaries should be interested in.
March 29th, 2004 at 10:30 am
It kills me when the comments eat my links! The link is here: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001217.php.
March 29th, 2004 at 2:44 pm
Note to self: in the future it may be advisable to actually read the stories before linking to them.
March 29th, 2004 at 6:16 pm
Eh, I linked to it, too. And I got a kick out of it. I believe that some words are actually mispronounced (nuclear vs. nucular, for example), and many more words have obvious preferred pronunciations. The list has flaws, but it’s still an interesting read.