Have any of you observed mispronunciations becoming acceptable in your lifetime? I'd be curious to read here about your observations. (I've read cross-references on this topic in the search section, by the way, but I'm raising this as a separate subject on how the unacceptable in our language have become (or are becoming) acceptable.
I suppose that we are much more aware of alternative pronunciations than the ones we grew up with, with we tend to regard as "correct". There is really nothing correct or incorrect about where the emphasis is placed in a word when two groups have developed independently and come up with a different interpretation. We spoke a long time ago about Bill Bryson's wonderful "Mother Tongue" and how some American words and speech are older than the words which replaced them in Britain (the use of gotten for example).
When I was young and foolish I would rail against American pronunciation of words. As an aside, I still dislike a fake accent. Compare Dick Van Dyke's "Mary Poppins" Cockney, widely regarded as hilariously bad, to Gwyneth Paltrow's heroic efforts. There are plenty of examples of Brits trying to sound American with greater or lesser success. This weekend there was a wonderful concert by Robbie Williams (the musician, not Robin, sadly he has never made it in the USA, and proved that even in a glamourous concert with black tie audience at the Albert Hall on BBC1 just after nine o'clock on a Saturday night, it really is Ok to broadcast the word f***, to link to an earlier thread ) singing Sinatra songs and varying between a "New Yoyk" accent and pure Stoke on Trent. It reminded me we don't grow up with the pure influences of our great grandparents. My parents sang "My Way" a lot more often than "The White Cliffs of Dover" and our ways of speaking evolved as a result.
One of the things that struck me in the early days of this group was whilst those of us in the rest of the world would recognise a North American variation as just that, a variation. Some of those from the US would fail to reciprocate. I think that we have moved on and I'm glad that it no longer only left to the Brits to point out our regional variations.
So part of the alternatives that we accept are to do with regional variations. I don't like the sound of "nucular", for example, but I no longer regard a person who uses it as an idiot.
