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OP How do you all pronounce this word? I will use -ain, rhyming with gain, to signify the long-a sound I mean, though it'll make the syllable division come out wrong. All my life, I have said, mis-SELL-uh-nee, and at least one Brit-speaker I know says it this way also. But I have spoken with two North Americans who say MISSle-ain-ee. What gives?
MISS-l-ain-ee
mis-SELL-uh-nee fer me.
MISS-l-ai-nee but i've been fooling around with mi-SELL-uh-nee, purely in a joking manner, I assure you.
Jackie,
Go to http://www.radio1.ie/audio_weekend.html and scroll down to Sunday Miscellany.
There's a wee problem with the recording and you have to forward 5mins into it to get the beginning of the programme. The announcer says the word the way it's pronounced in this part of the world.
FWIW,
AHD (4th ed) gives only MISSle-ain-ee, while OED (2nd... wish I had the 3rd!!) offers both, with MISSle-ain-ee the preferred pronunciation. What do y'all Brits and Antipodeans say?
I've only heard the word pronounced with the first syllable stressed. Also, there's a setting of one of Frost's poems about some girl who raises vegetebles -- cannot remember the title of the song or the poem -- but in the song, the stress falls, too, on the first syllable of miscellany. I'll see whether someone here remembers the title of that vegetable poem. I recall that part of the poet's humorous thrust about the girl is that she never told the same story twice to anyone.
Best regards,
Miss Soul, I Need Dust
From http://www.uuwestport.com/garden.htm:
A Girl's Garden
Robert Frost
A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.
One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, "Why not?"
In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, "Just it."
And he said, "That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm."
It was not enough of a garden
Her father said, to plow;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don't mind now.
She wheeled the dung in a wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load,
And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.
A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees.
And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider-apple
In bearing there today is hers,
Or at least may be.
Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.
Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, "I know!
"It's as when I was a farmer..."
Oh never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.
Dear Jazz,
Thanks for that. Good to see that poem again after so many years---probably a good twenty-five years since I've read it.
Best regards,
WW
MISS schwa lay knee
With the main emphasis on the first syllable, and a secondary emphasis on the third syllable.
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