Heard on The Judges: "compromise"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Dec 16 15:03:33 UTC 2008


Judge Penny [pInI], forty-four-year-old, black female speaker from Georgia:

"Do you know what a marriage [m&:G] is [iIz]?

Forty-four-year-old, Latino female college graduate married to a white
aerospace engineer:

"Yes. It's two people compromising "com PROMising" ["kam 'pram at sIN]."


I've never heard this pronunciation before. Which is not to say that,
at one time, I wouldn't have used it, myself. It's only that, as fate
would have it, I never had occasion to speak this word during the time
when I would have said, "com PROMising."

-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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