spelling pronunciation--words in -or

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Fri Mar 20 19:17:40 UTC 2009


On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Charles Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
>
>
> My students occasionally evince incredulity/amusement/anguish at my pronunciation of "metaphor"
> with an unstressed final syllable /-f at r/.

As did, famously, Zell Miller, before challenging Chris Matthews to a
duel in 2004.

"That was a metaphor, wasn‘t it?  Do you know what a metaphor is?"

video: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7644466/ (4 minutes in)
transcript: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5892840/



--Ben Zimmer

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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