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Posted By: Jackie Miscellany - 03/25/02 03:19 AM
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?

Posted By: Sparteye Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 03:26 AM
MISS-l-ain-ee

Posted By: modestgoddess Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 03:54 AM
mis-SELL-uh-nee fer me.

Posted By: Faldage Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 10:02 AM
MISS-l-ai-nee but i've been fooling around with mi-SELL-uh-nee, purely in a joking manner, I assure you.

Posted By: Rubrick Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 11:27 AM
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.

Posted By: AnnaStrophic Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 12:32 PM
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?

Posted By: Wordwind Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 02:35 PM
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

Posted By: Jazzoctopus Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 05:54 PM
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.


Posted By: Wordwind Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 11:12 PM
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

Posted By: Angel Re: Miscellany - 03/25/02 11:19 PM
MISS schwa lay knee
With the main emphasis on the first syllable, and a secondary emphasis on the third syllable.

Posted By: RhubarbCommando Re: Miscellany - 03/26/02 11:21 AM
I hear both over in UK, failry equally (?) perhaps a slight bias toward miss-CELL-ain-ee (my own preference.

However, I say MISS-ell-Ain-ee-us (slight stress on 2nd syllable) and I can't think that I have heard any other pronunciation than that.

Posted By: Jazzoctopus Re: Miscellany - 03/26/02 09:20 PM
The more I think about this, the more I think that I don't really stress any of the syllables much more than the others. I would split it up as miss-uh-lain-ee and I think there might be a slight emphasis on the third syllable, but then I go and think there might be a little stress on the first . . . I dunno.

Posted By: wwh Re: Miscellany - 03/26/02 09:27 PM
I confess to a childish mnemonic device of trying to preserve the sound of the root word. When I hear "Miss" I remember "mix". "Sellany" doesn't give me any clue.

Posted By: tsuwm Re: Miscellany - 03/26/02 10:06 PM
fwiw, here are a couple of miscellaneous pronunciations:
http://www.bartleby.com/61/wavs/8/M0330800.wav
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/audio.pl?miscel04.wav=miscellany

http://home.mn.rr.com/wwftd/
Posted By: wwh Re: Miscellany - 03/26/02 11:30 PM
Hey, tsuwm, that bartleby pronunciation of "miscellaneous" is the first word I can remember being able to hear correctly on my computer! I hear all of the vowels, but few of the consonants.

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