{"id":23,"date":"2009-01-18T23:15:35","date_gmt":"2009-01-19T06:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/eatreadandbeharried\/?p=23"},"modified":"2009-01-18T23:15:35","modified_gmt":"2009-01-19T06:15:35","slug":"ahem-pronouncements-on-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/ahem-pronouncements-on-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Ahem! Pronouncements on Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

My son has very sensitive skin. Every year, we get at least one call from school saying he’s broken out in hives and can we come get him. It’s not hives; he has a condition called dermatographia<\/a>, which makes the slightest touch register on his skin as a red mark. It usually takes 10 or 15 minutes to fade. His sensitive skin has also manifest in occasional bouts of eczema<\/a>. The icy weather in December gave him a really bad case on his hands, and while over-the-counter cortisone cream and a week in the warm moist air of Florida helped, his hands ended up cracked, itchy and bleeding by the end of the year. Off we went to the doctor, who gave us a prescription strength steroid ointment and told us to use Burt’s Bees hand salve<\/a> three times a day, too. This was when the arguments began.<\/p>\n

I say “salve” to rhyme with “valve.” I always have. Husband says “salve” to rhyme with “have.” Always has. Every time I told my son to put on “salve-to-rhyme-with-valve”, Husband would yell “salve-to-rhyme-with-have”. So then came the dueling dictionaries. We have two unabridged ones in the house, and my dad’s old partner’s college one from the 60s. They seemed to support Husband. Then I went pronunciation shopping on line and quickly found Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary <\/a>which had my pronunciation there, third in line. So there.<\/p>\n

We’ve had these pronunciation arguements before — he says “greasy” to rhyme with “easy” not with the hard “s” of grease. I think that might be an east coast or southern thing. He doesn’t says grease to rhyme with ease, so why should changing the e to a y make a pronunciation difference?<\/p>\n

All this is happening as we are both reading Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare<\/i><\/a> by Jeremy Butterfield. It’s a UK-centric look at language, usage, and dictionaries. It’s the kind of book I find fascinating — but then I read books like Pinkert’s Practical Grammar<\/i> (which doesn’t seem to be in print any more, but was a fun and funny way to learn about grammar) and Eats Shoots and Leaves <\/i><\/a>for entertainment.<\/p>\n

More importantly, it’s a book that supports what I’ve long said to Husband when he groans over phrases like “software program” [“It’s redundant! Software is a program!” — to which I replied that most people probably think of software as the thing you install and the program as the think geeks like Husband write]: that usage is the master of pronunciation and definition. What we say it means as a population trumps dictionaries, especially those compiled half a century ago. How we say it in Seattle trumps how they say it in Gainesville, at least as long as I’m in Seattle when I say it.<\/p>\n

Bummer to all those linguistics geeks. And yahoo for them, too: it gives them stuff to study and argue about.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My son has very sensitive skin. Every year, we get at least one call from school saying he’s broken out in hives and can we come get him. It’s not hives; he has a condition called dermatographia, which makes the slightest touch register on his skin as a red mark. It usually takes 10 or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,125,129,163],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-burts-bees","tag-language","tag-linguistics","tag-pronunciation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/landguppy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}