Pronuncations

[Herb Stahlke]

I've found that paradoxical reaction with "hone in on," which several
people have insisted to me was the correct form and "home in on" made
no sense at all.  I believe we've discussed this one before.  I
noticed that the edition of MWDEU that I have credits the earliest
usage to George H. W. Bush in a 1977 or 1978 campaign speech.  The
newer edition, I believe, traces it back at least another decade, but
I don't have that edition.

Herb

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Pronuncations
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jan 15, 2009, at 11:16 AM, Barbara Need wrote:
>
>> Some years ago I was teaching an Intro to Linguistics using the OSU
>> Language Files. one of the exercises listed alternative pronunciations
>> and asked students to say which they used and which was "correct". One
>> of the pairs was just this pair of variants. The student who got this
>> as we went around the class confessed to using the t-less
>> pronunciation, "but I know it's wrong".
>
> lovely.  over the years i've come across a number of other reversals
> in usage judgments.  there are actually two types of such reversals,
> the difference being in how much confidence judges have in their own
> practices.
>
> both types depend on the judges knowing that there is some
> prescription as to the choice of variant.  if judges are unsure of the
> correctness of their grammar -- many people are -- then even if they
> use the prescribed form, they will be inclined to apologize for their
> usage (as above).
>
> but if judges are more confident that what they say is right (though
> in fact they use the proscribed variant), then they will be inclined
> to "correct" people who use the prescribed variant.  somewhere i have
> an account of a non-linguist friend who expressed astonishment that i,
> a linguist, wrote something like "They were lying on the bed" -- when,
> according to him, it should be "laying".  he knew that there was a
> usage issue here, and assumed that his version was correct.
>
> i should try to find these reports and assemble them into a file.
>
> arnold
>
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