the pronunciation of Gray/Grey

[Douglas Bigham]

I'm not saying, nor was I ever saying, that the OED should insert two
completely seperate entries for 'grey' and 'gray'.  I'm saying that I,
personally, use them differently.  And, I also use 'theatre' and 'theater'
differently.  And all four have seperate pronunciations.  And I can't do good
phonetics on e-mail, so here's this distinction:
'grey' [epislon-i] almost a monophthong vowel, the [i] is barely there
'gray' a definite diphthong [e-i:] vowel
'theatre' said with an affected (and bad) British accent, as the Pet Shop
Boys would sing it.
'theater' ends with a muddy [turned r] with no affectation of any kind.

These are, admittedly, connotative differences.  That's not a bad thing.  But
then again, color terms exist in many shades of semantic nit-picking (what's
the difference between dusty rose and mauve?) for different colour hues
(tee-hee) so my overly sensitive response to seeing a difference in 'grey'
and 'gray' isn't unheard of.

-db