"precedures" and "bullets"

[Chris F. Waigl]

On Tue, 2006-08-29 at 10:02 -0700, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> The context and enunciation gave no evidence of this being a speech
>  error or slip of the tongue. Had it appeared so, I wouldn't have
>  brought it to the attention of the list.
>
>  Nor do the 100,000 hits on "precedure/s" suggest "speech errors."
>
>  If, as I suggested, the word is a novel term-of-art meaning something
>  like "preliminary procedures," well and good.
>
>  If, however, it represents a widespread hypercorrect "spelling
>  pronunciation" of a foolish misspelling based on a defective
>  familiarity with the elementary English word "procedure, it is dead
>  wrong as well as confusing. I don't see it as comparable to the use,
>  for example, of the article "a" before a vowel, which is not a
>  stupidism. It doesn't suggest an ignorance of basic vocabulary and has
>  no bearing whatsoever on meaning.
>
>  I'm sure I have uttered stupidisms of my own, but that doesn't
>  justify their existence. Stupidisms deserve to be "gotcha'd."

Being German, I grew up in a family that observed that one immutable New
Year's Eve ritual that a large proportion of the German population
follows: watching "Dinner for One", in English, on TV. It was only last
year that I learnt, to my amazement, that the sketch is apparently known
by Germans _only_, or very nearly. Luckily, Wikipedia has the background
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_for_One) and Google the actual
sketch (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8908622153579785434)

The reason I mention this here is the recurrent exchange between the old
lady Miss Sophie and her increasingly drunk butler James during her
birthday dinner party goes as follows:

James: The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?
Miss Sophie: The same procedure as every year, James!

I knew these lines by heart before receiving any instruction in English
and heard them repeatedly before I would get even close to using big
words like "procedure" in a foreign language. In fact, for years this
exchange was virtually the only bit of the 11min sketch I could
understand.

Now there will be more knowledgeable people than me to comment on the
actors' accents (May Warden is from Leeds and Freddie Frinton from
Lincolnshire), but one thing I took from this was the strong conviction
that, for some unfathomable reason, the English word that meant the same
as the familiar German "Prozedur" must be spelled something like
"precedure" or similar -- but in any case starting with "pre".

Chris Waigl
I watched it yesterday for the first time in years,
and it's strange how things can look much less funny
once one has reached a certain stage in one's adult development

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