Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004

Good work.  Keep it up.

Phooey! Before posting, I had caught a couple of instances where I wrote
/'fl&ks@d/ where I should have written /'fl&s@d/, but I didn't catch this
one. It should be "I use the /'fl&s@d/ pronunciation."

There is, of course, no "received standard" US pronunciation. There's no
standard US accent at all. At best, we have various "neutral" accents, which
were apparently the source of the idea, no longer widely held, that there is
some accent called "General American."

As for the difference between /'pinIs/ and /'pin@s/, I'm curious how
Webster's Third treats the pronunciation of the unstressed "short 'i'" in
this and other words. Webster's Third shows more pronunciation variants than
any other dictionary that I am aware of, to the point of being
headache-inducing.

I think the guys here should take a hard position on this.

In alt.usage.english, Professor Spira wrote:

I have friends like that. Their idea of conversation is to recite the
menus, item by item, price by price, of every restaurant and snack bar
they encountered (even those they didn't eat at) during their most
recent holiday, often including exact directions on how to find each
place, sometimes accompanied by a sketch map of the resort drawn on a
napkin. This process can take as much as two hours and they deflect and
resent every attempt at changing the subject. And if I drift off and
fail to make the right noises of encouragement, or it becomes clear that
I would turn right rather than left at the Ataturk statue when searching
for Ismet's Happy Snapper, they go back to the top and start all over
again. It is *surreally* boring and, like you with the local hack, at
some stage during the recitation I always find myself examining them
slyly for signs of post-modernism. Squeezing my hands under the table
until they hurt fills up another ten minutes or so, as does pounding the
heel of one boot onto the toes of the other. Quite *astoundingly*
boring, it is.

It's not just me, either. Before they became a couple, the male half of
this astounding duo met me for lunch and brought along a girl he had
picked up the night before. At one point, he had to go and do some
shopping . He was scarcely out of the door when she leant forewords and
hissed, 'If he mentions another bloody menu, I swear I'll kill him!'
This after less than 24 hours of acquaintance.

Recently, they have embraced a new form of torture. They've discovered
DIY programmes and the last time I stayed with them their idea of
entertainment on a sunny Sunday afternoon was to sit me down on the sofa
and put on video-tapes of DIY programmes they had recorded during the
previous seven days. I groaned, I moaned, I declared my hatred of such
programmes, but it was no good. In the end, I went for a walk by myself,
returning a couple of hours later to find them still mute and
slack-jawed in front of the MDF.

(Why are we still friends? I hear you ask. Well, I did try to let the
friendship die at one point, but they didn't notice. And I'm quite fond
of them in a way. I mean, how can one not be a little bit fond of people
like that?)

Thank you for listening. I feel a lot better now.

I'm not sure how admirable it is to be companions in ignorance.

Many an older New Yorker pronounces "success" as "sussess."  What of
that?