"Expleetive"

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:50 PM -0400 4/5/07, James Harbeck wrote:
>That was how I said it when I was a kid. "Expleetive deleeted"
>sounded pretty good to me. But then my parents corrected me (a few
>times, because I didn't like the sound of the "proper" pronunication).
>
>It's not unreasonable to think it might be pronounced that way, after
>all. The "ex" is a prefix of the sort that often goes unstressed. Add
>to that the fact that in the Latin the e is long. And in the OED, the
>"expleetive" translation is also listed (in second spot).
>
Maybe "exPLEEtive" sounds too much like "exCREEtive".

As far as the unstressed "ex", that also comes up in the variation
between "EXquisite" and "exQUISite"; even AHD4, which only gives the
antepenult variant for "expletive", gives both for "exquisite",
although it "favors" the antepenult version (which I'd wager is
considerably the rarer of the two in actual usage).

LH

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