"Silver Tsunami" (first "boomer" files for Social Security)

[Tom Zurinskas]

For want of a term, I call this "spelnouncing" - pronouncing a word as it's spelled,
or as one intuits its pronunciation from the usual pronunciation of the letter strings
that make up a word.  I like this because it follows the alphabetic principle, that
letters stand for sounds.  The fact that many words do not follow spelnouncing
makes English harder to learn.  I'm all for making English easier to learn and say.

Basically I think that American's should tell the powers that be that "tidal wave"
is a prefered term to "harbor wave" which is what "tsunami" means.  If they have
a good reason, I'd like to know it.  Perhapas "typhoon" is preferable to "hurricane?"

Tom Zurinskas, USA - CT20, TN3, NJ33, FL5+
See truespel.com - and the 4 truespel books plus "Occasional Poems" at authorhouse.com.




> Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:42:30 -0400
> From: laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
> Subject: Re: "Silver Tsunami" (first "boomer" files for Social Security)
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Laurence Horn
> Subject: Re: "Silver Tsunami" (first "boomer" files for Social Security)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 9:01 PM -0400 10/24/07, Dennis Preston wrote:
>>Stephen,
>>
>>1) If you can't muster German /sts/, please don't look at Polish.
>>
>>2) No; to my knowledge you are the only native speaker of English (if
>>you are one) who pronounces the /m/ in mnemonic. Should we notify
>>Guiness?
>
> I pronounce *an* /m/ in mnemonic. ;-)
>
> LH
>
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