Thanks for the forte link, faldage. Interesting that the original pronunciation is now so uncommon that it sounds incorrect...and why is the original suddenly being used again? However, I know I've seen it spelled with that pesky é in respectable publications and some dictionaries over the years. Could it be because the now-preferred pronunciation sounds French?
employee/employe We have an editor of a weekly here on the Jersey Cape who demands his writers spell employee with one "e". This gentleman is well into his seventies so this is not some young upstart, and his explanation is simply that employe is correct and the extra "e' is a wasted letter, or something to that effect. According to the dictionaries the one-e spelling is acceptable, but we can never get used to writing or seeing it. I've never seen it spelled this way before or since. Has anyone else ever encountered employe? Please note it is still pronounced the same, so I guess this is embarking on a different variation...is there a word for this linguistic twist, tsuwm?
aunt An obvious example missed. The awnt, ant pronunciations for aunt I generally take to be a Brit/USN thing, although sometimes it just seems to be a matter of preference (or the haughtiness of class when used by the Blue Book society set here in the US).
