Have schools just completely given up teaching kids to spell? Because it seems that nowadays, people coining neologisms just spell them any way they feel like without any regard for pronounciation whatsoever. It might make sense (it’d still be wrong, but at least understandable) if these dolts only interacted with each other via text and never, ever pronounced any of these words out loud, but that isn’t the case; if anything, many of them prefer to watch videos rather than learn via the written word. Intentional misspellings have long been common in branding, but at least the brand spelling could usually still be pronounced correctly; “Kool-Aid” is pronounced the same as “Cool-ade” would be. But one of the brands of cannabis edibles I often find in our house is called “Flav”, apparently prounced “Flave”; there was a ’90s rapper whose stage name contained the same linguistic abortion.
Silent E is not an optional rule, as Tom Lehrer reminds us; he even warns against adding an “x”, advice apparently unfamiliar to the halfwits who coined the wokism “Latinx”, a construction which manages to be an offense to two languages. This may come as a shock to those who believe the name “Xavier” is pronounced “ecks-ayvier”, but the letter “x” is only pronounced “ecks” if set apart by a space or hyphen, as in “x-ray” or “X factor”. “Xylophone” is not pronounced “ecks-why-low-fone”, and “box” doesn’t rhyme with “Bowflex”; why then do the rather dim imagine “Latinx” should be pronounced any way but “laa-tinks”? And how the devil do its adherents imagine “womxn” should be pronounced? I can’t even think of a wrong way to vocalize that. But the idea that adjacent letters can be prounounced as though there were some kind of punctuation between them isn’t limited to “x”, oh no; I regularly see people pronouncing the neologism “cishet” (a contraction for “cisgender heterosexual”) as “siss het”, which it cannot be because “sh” is a digraph, a pairing of two letters that make one sound. “Washing” is not pronounced “waass hing”, and if you want the coinage to be pronounced the way it commonly is, it should be spelled “cis-het” at the very least. Suffering Sappho, people, I have no aversion to neologisms; I use plenty of them myself. But doesn’t English have enough exceptions to rules of spelling and pronounciation already without y’all adding new ones totally unmoored from either tradition or logic? Words mean things, and so do spellings.
POSTSCRIPT: A reader has pointed out that “mishap” is pronounced in the same way as “cishet”, so it’s an unusual but not-unheard-of pronounciation of that combo. I therefore rescind my criticism of that one, though I personally still think it sounds awkward.
“Words mean things, and so do spellings”
How very true, and how pitiful that both spelling and meaning have been so grossly distorted these days.
Along with the importance of spelling, let’s not forget that of clear writing, as exemplified in Orwell’s six rules:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Granted, I tend to have a great fondness for the sixth rule, but always in the course of upholding Orwell’s core purpose.
THANK YOU! I too am appalled by the complete disregard for proper grammar, punctuation, pronunciation and the like nowadays. As if the “kids these days” don’t proudly display their ignorance enough.
If you have never heard this I believe you will absolutely LOVE it. It has become my favorite from a man I consider an underrated genius … this is his best.
This version is FAR superior to the original!
Amen brother!
Students should have to watch this and everything they don’t understand becomes the basis for their lesson plan. FWIW, I love the oxford comma, but I’m also a self-confessed abuser and misuser of semicolons.
Your posts are one of the best things that I receive in my inbox.
Thank you for your honesty,
Ami
On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 05:01 The Honest Courtesan wrote:
> Maggie McNeill posted: “Have schools just completely given up teaching > kids to spell? Because it seems that nowadays, people coining neologisms > just spell them any way they feel like without any regard for > pronounciation whatsoever. It might make sense (it’d still be wrong, bu” >
What are the rules for x in the middle of words without a dash? Specifically, I am thinking of the word Bexar.
How would you pronounce Bexar as in Bexar county from San Antonio, Texas? In case you do not know, the correct pronunciation appears to be “bear”.
I remember that my Introduction to Spanish morphology professor in university informed us of the linguistically interesting history of the name of Bexar county. If I remember correctly it was originally named Condado de Bexar pronounced as “behar” with the x pronounced as the “j” is pronounced in Spanish because it was a Spanish settlement. Through the natural change of language and the settlement of German and English speakers the Spanish “j” sound was dropped and became “bear” county.
“Bexar” is a Spanish word, therefore governed by Spanish pronounciation rules. It’s not unusual for foreign words imported into English to have weird pronounciations due to rule confusion.
I feel like the increased disregard for spelling rules is partly due to instant messaging allowing unlimited text now.
Think about it, back when we used the telegraph, or early SMS, words & sentences were whittled down to the bare minimum glyphs required for comprehension. Today, young people don’t type “lyk dis” because no one needs to. No extra money per character. But response is also much more immediately possible to make & also demanded in a way. So neither sender nor recipient can calmly think over the response like you would to a traditional letter.
To deal with this, kids on the internet found a way to put vocal tones into text. A bunch of linguists & English professors even wrote theses about internetspeak or Tumblrspeak, whatever you wish to call it. And now a big thing is not the same same as A Big Thing, or A BiG tHiNG. One is old school English, the second is added emphasis, and the third is a hysterical tone of voice either for sarcasm or outrage. With the capital/small case distinction being the first thing to go, it was only a matter of time before spelling & grammar started seeming like optional things. Especially with how lawless English spelling already is in general.
And afaik, with a lot of neologisms you’ll find floating around on the internet, the reasons for coining them are political & emotional in nature, not academic. Womxn most probably came around coz “why do we have to mention ‘men’ when we talk about women,” but was propagandized as a more inclusive trans-positive term, even though it’s basically the E being censored out of the word using an X instead of an asterisk.
Cishet on the other hand is an actual pair of contractions yoked to each other for convenience, but not hyphenated because the people who use the term are usually familiar enough to understand it & it’s also funny that it’s so close to “shit” in terms of both spelling & pronunciation if someone doesn’t know how to split it. Not a lot of people actually outgrow the childish joy of name-calling.
Well spoken, and The Best Page in the Universe has been criticizing this for years. (Ditto for I-Mockery and myself.)
This is basically why I think that compulsory public education needs to end.
How do you pronounce mishap (and other words with prefix mis or dis), Portishead, physharmonica? (Never mind foreign words like keeshond.)
You are completely right about “mishap”; I did not think of that one.
Mis- and dis- words do have some wild mispronunciations. My favorite is misled (past tense of mislead) sometimes mispronounced “miseld”, and taking on meanings as a verb vaguely related to the noun miser.
A word which has come to have two different pronunciations depending on use: coax.
Originally a transitive verb: pronounced to rhyme with “cokes” (plural of “coke”); meaning to urge, to persuade. Coax the dog to go outside.
Has also become a noun, sometimes a verb: pronounced as “Co axe”; abbreviation for “coaxial cable”. Did you install the coax? Yes, I coaxed every room.
From what I can tell, people have always spelled words “any way they feel like without any regard for pronounciation whatsoever”.
The simple fact that there are homographs and homophones show how hopeless it all is. What we’re taught is not for nought, but sometimes we’re too close to close the subject. “Ough” is especially bad; Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through. If you want proper spelling in school, start by spelling it skool.
If English were rational, silent E would be placed immediately after the vowel it’s modifying.
To disregard norms of spelling and pronounciation is minor among the pantheon of outrageous things being taught in our schools today, and it comes from the same wellspring as most of the rest — anti-white racism, called by its supporters “Critical Race Theory” and/or “anti-racism.” They also teach that 2+2 can be 5 (because insisting on one right answer is “racist”), and that anyone who displays or supports such virtues as punctuality, attention to detail, or a work ethic is a “white supremacist” — including black conservatives. I am not making this up.
If you’re not aware of this, I suggest you throw away your TV and start following alternative media, especially podcasts. The once-mainstream media have been gaslighting the public since at least 2008, and have forfeited the trust that allowed them to define a mainstream.
Maggie’s rule applies only to an initial ‘x’ without a hyphen. In a middle or end position, ‘x’ is pronounced ‘ecks’, for instance ‘example’ and ‘index’. These words all have a vowel before the ‘x’. You need that preceding vowel to pronounce ‘x’ in the English manner, and so words that evolved within English have a vowel before ‘x’. Any English word with an initial non-hyphenated ‘x’ is borrowed from another language, with the ‘x’ pronounced according to the rules of that language.