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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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get Faldage too involved in this discussion you'll get a lesson on bird and brid
In the case of nucular I'm more likely to bring up the example of Hercules and Herakles but then some nit-picker would probably complain that this should go in Words from classical mythology.
Nucular has a couple of things going for it. One is the large number of scientific words that end in -ular, e.g., molecular, cellular, etc., to act as models. The only other common word that ends in -clear is clear itself (and derivative words such as unclear). The other thing is that there is a standard linguistic process that I don't remember enough about to expound upon in any detail here but which perhaps one of our linguists could. It is probably the same thing that turned the Greek Herakles into the Latin Hercules.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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but then some nit-picker would probably complain
must... resist... temptation...
standard linguistic process
metathesis? Like brid -> bird?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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brid -> birdYeahbutİ, I think there's something specific to the CL thang that makes it special. This site http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/mispron.html points out that British and Australians find the American repetition of the [u] between the [k] and [l] quaintly amusing. Good reason [to] get it right.Ut si!
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Carpal Tunnel
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There's also something called Attraction that plays a role in nucular. If it were just metathesis it would come out something like nukelar. Attraction causes a vowel change to match a nearby vowel, giving us nucular (although it is usually pronounced nucyular).
Just googling metathesis nucular gives a small but interesting group of sites.
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Pooh-Bah
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The easiest way to remind yourself to pronounce it correctly is to remember that it sounds like "new clear." By the way there was an album in 1980 by a band called The Vapors called "New Clear Days" which contained the song "Turning Japanese."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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I'm afraid this is another of a too-large number of degradations of the language that have evolved despite all efforts. Chalk it up next to Febyooary, liberry, between you and I, and split infinitives.
Correcting these misusages is an unrewarding, nay a thankless task, and in the sense of choosing your battles may be not worth our aggravation. The best I've been able to come up with (see? preposition-at-end-of-sentence was another one one hundred years ago, wasn't it?) is to lead by example and choose my own words with care.
Still, it's frustrating to be "right" but smothered by the rest of 'em. Ain't it?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Let me know whether I'm incorrect in what I've learned--especially since I've never studied Latin--but what I heard an English professor state was it was ridiculous not to split the infinitive when a writer wanted to get the adverb closer to the verb itself for emphasis. The professor's reasoning was that the Latin infinitive was a single word, not two as are English infinitives. By forcing the adverb to either precede or follow the two-word English infinitive, force was lost and awkwardness was often the only gain. He gave us a long list of sentences in which the two-word infinitive had not been split and companion sentences in which the adverb was nestled up right against the root verb after the "to." I thought his was a point well-taken.
WW
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Carpal Tunnel
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I guess the thing about this use of nucular by Dubya that most puzzles and amazes me is that his many advisors must all say it the same way; otherwise one of them would have gently corrected him.
I personally consider the mispronunciation of nuclear as a sign of lack of education. And if Dubya's been idificated and still does it it's a sign of stupidity. Ignorance can be cured, stupidity goes all the way to the bone.
TEd
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Carpal Tunnel
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Smart courtiers do not correct the King. That's why we call London's river the Tems. Edit: Peccavi. The above appears to be a canard. No mention of it in AHD http://www.bartleby.com/61/11/T0141100.html
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