5 days ago
TOM UTLEY: Susie, the serene goddess of Countdown, has thrown in the towel - but I'm still manning the barricades against the language louts!
Et tu, Susie? Just as Julius Caesar thought his friend Brutus was the last man on Earth who would betray him, so I imagined Susie Dent would defend to her final breath the correct pronunciation of common English words.
But no. This week, the serene goddess of Countdown's Dictionary Corner appeared to throw in the towel over the widespread mispronunciation of the word mischievous.
So many people get it wrong, she declared, that it no longer bothers her to hear it pronounced 'mischievious', to rhyme with 'devious', as if it were spelt with a third 'i' after the 'v'.
True, she was not saying the mispronunciation had now become standard English. Nor was she endorsing it as 'acceptable', as one or two mischievous headline-writers have suggested.
But she did seem to regard the mistake with a certain detached, academic resignation, as if it were merely an interesting illustration of the way language evolves.
My own instinct, by contrast, is to man the barricades against assaults on our language and 'rage, rage against the dying of the light'.
Speaking at the Hay Festival, where she was promoting her new murder mystery, Guilty By Definition, Dent said: 'Something which used to rile me was people pronouncing mischievous as mischie-vi-ous. But now it's everywhere and there is a very good reason why people do.
'It's the way English people have always pushed out a pronunciation that is no longer familiar to them. We don't have any 'ievous' words any more, and they're pushing it to something that they do know, and that's 'evious'.
'So I have now decided it's a fascinating snapshot of how language works and it doesn't really bother me – not any more.'
Well, all I can say is that it bothers me a lot. Indeed, far from becoming more tolerant as the years go by, I find that the older I get, the more such petty crimes against our language irritate me.
Oh, I know that in this vale of tears, with wars raging in Ukraine, the Middle East and elsewhere, and our own country plunging headlong into bankruptcy, there are far more important things to worry about than the mispronunciation of a common English word.
I know, too, that Dent, who is a far more distinguished student of words than I will ever be, is quite right to say that living languages evolve with the passage of time. After all, it's not only pronunciations that change, but spellings and even the meanings of words.
To take one frequently cited example, the word 'silly' went through a whole range of meanings – including happy, holy, rustic, weak and lowly – before it settled on its modern definition as a synonym for daft.
Meanwhile, I'd hate to think I'm becoming as pedantic as my late grandfather, a classics scholar, who insisted on pronouncing 'margarine' with a hard g (apparently it comes from the Greek word for a pearl, which is spelt with a gamma) and cinema as 'Kye-knee-ma', because its ancient Greek root begins with a kappa.
As I may have mentioned before, he was also such a stickler for correct grammar that when my mother asked him if he'd like more spaghetti, he replied: 'Well, perhaps just a few'. (The word spaghetti, you understand, is the plural of spaghetto; strictly speaking, it's therefore wrong to speak of 'just a little spaghetti'.)
But there must be at least some trace of my grandfather in me, since I constantly find myself wincing over common mispronunciations and grammatical mistakes.
It sets my teeth on edge, for example, when I ask almost anyone under the age of about 35 'How are you?', and the answer comes back: 'I'm good'.
Indeed, I have to bite my lip to stop myself from saying: 'I wasn't asking about your morals. I just wanted to know if you were well!'
In the same way, it irritates me like anything when people ask at the bar: 'Can I get...', when the traditional form, on my side of the Atlantic at least, is 'May I have...'
And why do so many of the young insist on starting every other sentence with the word 'so'? (Ask them what they do for a living, and the chances are they will give some incomprehensible answer, such as: 'So, I'm a local government project outreach manager.')
Won't somebody teach BBC reporters, meanwhile, that singular subjects take singular verbs? I've lost count of the number of times I've switched on the news to hear sentences such as: 'The collapse in shares are sending shock-waves through the financial world.' Are it really?
Or take the way in which many who are confused or ambiguous about their sexual identity like to be referred to by the plural pronouns 'they' and 'them'. What bugs me quite as much as any other consideration is the way this mangles English grammar.
As for quirks of pronunciation, I suppose I should admit that some of my objections are merely snobbish.
For example, nobody on BBC London seems able to say the word 'hospital' in the way I was brought up to pronounce it. Asad Ahmad and most of his colleagues give it three equally stressed syllables ('hosp-it-tool'), instead of rhyming it with little or skittle. (Mind you, some of them say 'littool' and 'skittool' as well.)
It annoys me, too, that Sir Keir Starmer seems to have trouble pronouncing his own job title, rendering it more often than not as 'Pry-Mister'. And don't get me started on the Chancellor's hideous, grating pronunciation of the name of the kingdom she's bringing to ruin, which she insists on calling the 'Yew-Kye'.
But some common pronunciations are just plain wrong. I'm thinking in particular of words we get from the French, such as restaurateur and lingerie. Again and again, you will hear the former pronounced as if it had an 'n' in it, and the latter as if it ended in -ay.
Mind you, my late father regarded it almost as his patriotic duty to mispronounce French words. I'll never forget his rebuking me once for pronouncing Marseilles the French way, as 'Mar-say.' 'Mar-say, boy? Mar-say?' he spluttered. 'The word is Mar-sails! You don't pronounce Paris 'Paree', do you?'
Other examples of common mispronunciations that are just plain wrong include 'Joo-le-ree' for jewellery, 'Feb-you-airy' for February and 'amen-o-knee' for that admittedly tricky tongue-twister, anemone.
Meanwhile, Dent herself cites the widespread mispronunciation of nuclear as 'nucular', saying it understandably irks a lot of people, while observing with her lexicographer's detachment that she thinks this is influenced by such words as molecular and secular.
She tells me: 'I'm certainly not saying 'anything goes'. Language needs to be fluent and articulate (and wherever possible, beautiful!) in order to be effective, and when we deviate from the standard it can affect the quality and comprehensibility of our writing or speech.'
All she is pointing out, she says, is that pronunciations have evolved for centuries, as we have adjusted sounds that no longer seem familiar to those that are.
'It can be irritating of course, and many will believe it is a degradation of English, all of which I understand,' she says. 'But there is perhaps reassurance in the fact that this is nothing new.'
Ah, well, I'm sure she's right on every count. But may not an old man rant?
