>When Popeye mispronounces muscles as "mus-kulls", it is a good >laugh. I don't find it at all funny, charming, cute, endearing, and >certainly not reassuring when the Commander-in-Chief of the biggest >arsenal of bombs in the world mispronounces nuclear as "nukey-ler".
>It isn't a case of the evolution of the language. It is a case of the >Peter Principle. Did you feel the same way when Jimmy Carter pronounced it that way? He does now, at least as of a TV appearance this summer, he did when he was commander in chief, and when he was in the service, when his job probably had him saying it many times every day. I, a reasonably educated Southerner, pronounced it that way until my first wife beat me into submission at around 30 years of age (she also purged her southern accent entirely by many hours of hard practice when she was about 13, but that's a different story). My dad, a newspaper editor, pronounced it that way, as did all of my relatives and teachers. My (pre-W. Bush) Webster's Ninth Collegiate has a "usage" note under the definition indicating that "though disapproved of by many," this pronunciation has been common "among educated speakers including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, US Cabinet members and at least one US president and one vice president." It also says it has been heard from British and Canadian speakers. Although it is changing now, I think, when I was growing up (I'm 47), nearly everyone in the South, a region comparable in size to, say, Europe, used this pronunciation. I think it is accordingly fair to exempt this pronunciation from scorn. Stu _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
