On Oct 18, 2006, at 11:42 AM, David W. Fenton wrote:
Ask Jimmy Carter, who is the only intelligent public figure I've ever heard using the nucular pronunciation (he was a nuclear engineer in the Navy, so it's not like he wasn't trained in the field).
Although I'm not old enough to have heard him, I understand that President Eisenhower also pronounced the word "nucular".
Regional variations in pronunciation are a reality of the language. Besides the overall regional accent, there are many words which have more than one acceptable pronunciation, and use of the variant pronunciation is strongly correlated to a regional or social group.
What is interesting to me is that some regional variations are considered ignorant and wrong while others are accepted as equally valid alternatives. Which is the case seems to be correlated not so much to the size of the group using the alternative as the social status of said group. The "nucular" pronunciation is overwhelmingly used in the South, and America has traditionally viewed its Southerners as less intelligent and less educated. For counter-example, the word envelope is pronounced like "on-velope" by roughly the same percentage of Americans who say "nucular", but you rarely hear complaints about it. That could be because the "on-velope" sayers are mostly in the Northeast, which has traditionally been the socially dominant region.
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