what do you drink? and/or convenience store

[Millie Webb]

I dunno, Matt.  About one hundred e-mails ago, a couple of people on here
were "complaining" about "having to have a word for everything" in terms of
every little nuance of meaning.  I did not have the impression they were
being completely facetious about it.  I don't have time right now to check
back on which set of words/meaning they were referring to.  It just took me
by surprise, so I remembered it.  Somewhere around the bathe is swim, bath
is bathe debate, I believe.  And I take a bath, or "bathe", BTW. ;-)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gordon, Matthew J." <GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Saturday, August 24, 2002 3:26 PM
Subject: Re: what do you drink? and/or convenience store


MIllie noted:

>PS - Oops, one more thing.  Matt, the other lexical terms/pronunciations
that almost always elicit all sorts of vehemently emotional reactions to
people who say it "the other way" is the "coupon"/"kyupon" distinction.


There are a lot of pronunication variants (e.g., creek, aunt, greasy, root)
that elicit strong feelings of correctness and 'coupon' is certainly one of
them.
Soda/pop is interesting b/c it's a lexical alternation not a phonological
one. Maybe people get so worked up about pronunciation b/c of the standard
language ideology that there should be a one and only one correct way of
pronouncing a word just like spelling. I don't think people usually believe
there should be one and only one correct word for a given concept/thing.
Maybe DInIs has some insight on this?