I made the mistake of confessing my handicap to a friend. Now he purposefully says nukular as a kind of Castañedan slap on the back, or the master's whack with the stick. He knows it knocks me out of whatever canal I was in. It's irritating, but a good thing overall.
Actually, it started with the pronunciation of diacetyl, which most of my friends at the brewery pronounce "die-ASS-uh-tul". That's another one that doesn't give me the hiccups. My Mansplainer homunculus doesn't even notice. But I did get a chance to discuss it with the owner, wherein I suggested that "ASS-uh-tal" is a chemical group that's fundamentally different from acetyl. And, even though there's almost zero chance of anyone *ever* saying the word "diacetal", it's still reasonable to prefer the more common "die-uh-SEE-tul". After all, nobody says "ASS-uh-tul-kole-een" or "ASS-uh-tul-een torch". On the other hand, hangovers are discussed a lot in places like breweries ... with taprooms at least. And acetaldehyde is (almost) pronounced like "ASS-uh-tul-dee-hide" (with some wiggle around "tul" vs "tal"). So, again, there is some slight reason prefer one pronunciation over the other. No such luck with nukular. Any desire to correct someone when they say it that way is empty (and actually false) pedantry. I still hate it, though. On 12/1/23 07:28, Frank Wimberly wrote:
My dad was a nuclear engineer and nukular has always bothered me greatly. I try to help people to say it right by telling them to think "new clear". I'm not sure that would help Bush. --- Frank C. Wimberly 140 Calle Ojo Feliz, Santa Fe, NM 87505 505 670-9918 Santa Fe, NM On Fri, Dec 1, 2023, 8:21 AM glen <geprope...@gmail.com <mailto:geprope...@gmail.com>> wrote: So, on the death of The War Criminal, I've been reflecting on the most irritating thing to me about George W Bush's stint: nukular. Sure. It's irritating that he started a war for no good reason. If we learn anything from Kissinger's treatment by the press, it's that those sorts of things don't actually matter. But the way you pronounce "nuclear"? That matters ... to me, anyway. I've managed to grind off the burrs in my thinking when someone says "axe" instead of "ask", glottals their Ts, etc. But I just can't get over nukular. Every time someone says it that way, whatever it was I was doing or thinking goes straight out the fscking window. With, say, "axe", I can actually do it myself without feeling shame. Same with t-flapping. (And vocal fry.) Wikipedia gives me a nice list of triggerable attributes of language: metathesis, elision, epenthesis, flapping, assimilation, dissimilation, etc. My request, here, is for examples from anyone that rankle you or that you've overcome. Presumably, the more aware I am with others' struggles with such, the less I'll be triggered by my own.
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