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.
