"Expleetive"

[Dennis R. Preston]

LH,

Do you really reckon the antepenult is the rarer of the two
pronunciations of "exquisite"? Which do you take to be the posher"?
(Ignoring a sort of inherent pseudo-poshness for the item itself.)

dInIs

>---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>Subject:      Re: "Expleetive"
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>
>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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