"adVERsary"?

[Michael Quinion]

Orin Hargraves wrote:

> ODE2 (the recently published update to NODE) gives adVERsary as a
> possible adjectival prons (when the word is used to mean adversarial),
> but it gives ADversary as the only noun prons. Perhaps this antepenult
> stress is slippage from other Brit prons like conTROVersy. I don't
> recall that I've heard adVERsary but it wouldn't seem jarring coming
> from an RP speaker.

As a non-RP speaker with what started out as a lower-class London
accent of the immediate postwar years, but which has been modified
since, I would always say "adVERsary" (not that I have cause to say
it often). My wife (from a lower middle-class north London family)
does the same. Neither of us would find it easy to get our tongues
around the stress pattern of "ADversary".


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>