"Expleetive"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Yeah, but is "EXpletive" "posher" than "exPLEEtive" ?  Or just "more traditional" ?

  I'd never heard "exPLEEtive" before, not even in the Watergate days.

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "Expleetive"
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At 10:05 AM -0400 4/6/07, Dennis R. Preston wrote:
>LH,
>
>Do you really reckon the antepenult is the rarer of the two
>pronunciations of "exquisite"?

Yes

>Which do you take to be the posher"?

The antepenult. Us ordinary folks grew up saying "exQUISite" until
Mrs. Grundy beat it out of us.

>(Ignoring a sort of inherent pseudo-poshness for the item itself.)

Well, there is that.

LH
>
>>---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>Sender: American Dialect Society
>>Poster: Laurence Horn
>>Subject: Re: "Expleetive"
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>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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