deaccenting

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

occasionally we've commented here on the deaccenting of secondarily
accented syllables in words that  are familiar and frequently used by
some group of people: the last syllable of "Oregon" for most
Oregonians, for instance.

now i've been hearing an ad on tv for low-dose aspirin in which "low-
dose" has a deaccented second element, so that it sounds, at first
hearing, like "lodose", some technical term with the learned suffix "-
ose".

arnold

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