26 March 2005
Connections
Almost done picking through The Best American Essays of 2003. There are such gems in many of the essay. This from Francis Spufford's "The Habit:"
The words we learned exclusively from books are the ones we pronounce differently from everyone else. Or, if we force ourselves to say them the public way, secretly we believe the proper pronunciation is our own, deduced from the page and not corrected by hearing the word aloud until it was too late to alter its sound. The classic is "misled," said not as mis-led but as myzled--the past tense of a verb, "to misle," which somehow never comes up in the present tense. In fact, misled never misled me. One of mine is "grimace." You probably think it's pronounced grimuss, but I know differnt. It's grim-ace, to rhyme with face. I'm sorry, but on this point the entire English-speaking human race except me is wrong.
One of mine is "capacity," pronounced CAP-a-city. Learned very young from a sign on a school bus.
[ posted by sstrader on
26 March 2005 at 1:31:13 PM in Language & Literature
]
- The city posted by sstrader on 6 March 2016 at 9:43:27 PM
- The children of Infinite Jest posted by sstrader on 23 August 2015 at 3:48:24 PM
- Posthuman dystopia posted by sstrader on 22 March 2015 at 10:21:25 AM
- Poetry and apocalypse posted by sstrader on 22 November 2014 at 10:41:33 AM
- Roman Jakobson's functions of language posted by sstrader on 5 October 2014 at 10:36:23 AM
Related entries
Other entries categorized in Language & Literature: