aste(r)perious

[Wilson Gray]

On Sep 5, 2004, at 2:26 PM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: aste(r)perious
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>
>> the accent pattern
>> isn't quite right: all the variants of "asterperious" would have the
>> pattern 2 v 1 v v (v is unaccented, 2 secondary accent, 1 primary
>> accent), while all the variants of "obstreperous" have the pattern 2 1
>> v v
>
> I don't deny that this is a point against my guess (which I've
> tentatively
> retracted anyway, since I think Jonathon Green's explanation has
> merit).
>
> But stress pattern is not necessarily preserved.
>
> Consider the word "masonary". This means exactly "masonry" AFAIK. I
> can't
> find any such (modern) word in any dictionary (although apparently
> there
> was Middle English "masonerie"). There are thousands of Google hits,
> including its appearance in company names and in other contexts where
> some
> care in spelling would have been expected. I've heard this word several
> times, and it is pronounced with four syllables, with secondary stress
> on
> the third, as expected from the spelling. Presumably "masonry" was
> misread/mispronounced (under influence of "stationery" or whatever) and
> then written as it was pronounced, etc. I believe "masonary" may be the
> dominant word for "masonry" at least in Pittsburgh (from my limited
> experience): I've heard it from laymen, and I've heard it from masons
> (lower-case "m"). I found this quite bizarre when I first heard it but
> apparently it doesn't bother the general public.
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>

FWIW, "masonary" is a pronunciation/spelling that I had to purge from
my own idiolect as I was "upgrading" it. Interestingly enough, it was
"masonry" that *I* found "quite bizarre" when I first saw it in print.
Of course, I'd seen "masonry" in print for years. Nevertheless, I
always read it as "masonary."

-Wilson Gray