And personally, I pronounce all of the days of the week, not just Woden’s Day, in true and accurate ways to honor the all-father and the other deities who reign over Midgaard.

If you want to hear some annoying voices and accents, listen to the BBC. This morning I heard “marathun”, “millitree”, “Febbery”, a glottal stop in “football”, and and a woman pronouncing “you” as something like “yee”. All this from obviously native speakers.

To mac, the Canadian: a lot you’ve got to holler about talking funny. Canada, the land where “about” comes out “aboot”. Listen to CBC presenters discuss “jawbs”, “dawlers”, and “hawkey” for a while and then tell me how dumb Americans sound, eh?

You could just as well pick on Obama for saying “They’re gonna tell you I have a funny name…” instead of “They’re going to tell you that I have a funny name…”

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/nucular.html

A few weeks ago I was at a ceremony where a mathematician giving a speech could never pronounce “statistics”. He always managed to drop a ‘t’ or two. Although I have no idea how “nucular” can possibly come about….

I was fortunate enough to be born into a Standard American English speaking household, so I sound “educated” natively. However, there’s no reason, a priori, why my dialect should sound educated. And don’t even try to single out “nuclear” as one word that ought to be pronounced according to its spelling when you have no problem with the myriad other English words that don’t follow their spelling at all.

So stop being so bigoted. It sounds “uneducated” to you just because you associate that dialect with uneducated people; not because it IS uneducated in any way.

Love your blog and always look forward to your posts.

I’d have to offer however, you might consider sticking to the cosmology and leave the politics to others.. your disparaging comments are heavy handed and elistist, and I am disappionted. They reflect poorly on a person whom I would have thought to have a broader and more accomidating view of his fellows, this considering your credentials. Ah well.

Regards, Meaux

I don’t waste my snobbish impulses on newcular.

The Test is basically an interview : someone from the ESL dept comes over and have a chat with me over coffee. It was scheduled for an hour. So we met, and she asked me to introduce myself and describe why I want to come to U of C. After 3 or 4 minutes into a monologue (i.e. I did most of the talking), she stopped me and said “Ok, you are fine. Interview’s over. You speak excellent English. There is only one thing that I would make a comment on : you pronounced ‘The’ as ‘Da’.”

9 years later, I still do that. I can’t get rid of a speech habit. It’s not that I can’t flick my tongue : I say “Thanks”, not “Danks”. So there.

I think, Maria_M, that what Joe Biden meant goes back to 2005:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62296-2005Mar1.html

We all know what happened after that.

There was a lot in the VP debate that was spoken in shorthand due to the time constraints.

For Ben (comment #1), is that similar to the way Brits mispronounce “mall,” so it *doesn’t* rhyme with “wall,” “tall,” or “ball?”

-pfd
http://www.ideasgreatanddumb.com

Actually, that’s a word that Americans almost UNIVERSALLY mispronounce.
It almost always comes out something like “Meer” (as in the painter from Delft)

I think ‘Nucular’ is a bit more than a question of pronounciation, more a inability to articulate the *cl* between those two particular vowels.

I actually heard someone using it on a TV science program(me) recently. Yes, it makes me cringe…..