Knowledge disapearing
A lot of people seem to take offense at GW Bush’s pronunciation of the word Nuclear. He says Nucular. People have lampooned him for that over the years, and I never really understood why. “Nukular” is an accepted pronunciation of the word, it’s the same way Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, JFK, Geral Ford, even Eisenhower pronounced the word. Even many nuclear physicists pronounce the word in this fashion. Look it up in merriam-webster. It’s there.
Now choice pronunciations aside, there is a deeper mystery–at least to me. In elementary school I was taught this pronunciation. This may be due to being raised in a “southern” state, but beyond the pronunciation I was taught to spell it as: nucular. A quick glance at most dictionaries show that is incorrect, however was it always? I distinctly remember textbooks showing the spelling I was taught. Normally I wouldn’t remember something so long ago so clearly, but the book in question had a little example to help you remember.
When you use Nuculus and Nucular you’re referring to atoms and the properties thereof.
You use Nuclear to reffer to something like Nuclear Family. A Nucular family would be silly! The only Nucular family we can think of might be the Jetsons!
This was the in mid 80’s. Does anyone else remember this? Was I the victim of a bad textbook (wouldn’t be too surprising.) Did the professor that wrote it just have an agenda to separate the words into their own entities? Over the years have we simplified them into one? I would just write it off to a bad text, except that I remember people using the word up through highschool, and only then people begining to say that it was incorrect.
This isn’t the only case of words changing over time that I’ve noticed. Example: Refridgerator vs Refrigerator. In this case both are still in common use today, in ads, dictionaries, and labeled right on the products. When was this difference introduced, and why? Are we simply getting lazy with our english, or is it a matter of dialect. I would like to know.
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Comment by Richard Montgomery — October 3, 2008 @ 4:37 pm
Lazy, lack of English education, heritage, and dialect (I know it’s a fragment). Yes, we are very lazy, but that usually results in slow speech and a messy neighborhood. I notice regional differences in speech and also common words. Youens, y’all, yantto, skoeat, eh, ubetcha, preciatecha, and dontchaknow. Not to mention words of the hood.
Words change overtime, such as, protest-tants, used to describe those that opposed the Church (Catholic), which eventually became protestants.
These are every day words used by both Republicans and Democrats. Do we pronounce these correctly? Not if you speak the Kings English.