The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

[Baker, John]

        I too pronounced "striped" as a monosyllable.  Merriam-Webster,
American Heritage, and Webster's New World all give both pronunciations
but prefer the one favored by Neal and me.

        I recently was surprised to hear my adult nephew and niece
pronounce "texted" with two syllables.  I am forced to admit the logic
of that pronunciation, since I pronounce "text" and "texted" as
homophones, but it still sounds weird to me.


John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
Of Neal Whitman
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 9:46 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

In my pile of unfinished posts there's one whose working title is "The
Stupid Striped Shirt". I tell about sitting on a swing in the playground
at preschool (which we called nursery school at the time), thinking
about the striped shirt I had on, and wondering why my mom pronounced
"striped" as [strajpId]. I pronounced it that way, too, just because
that was the form I'd learned, but as I thought about it, I couldn't see
any reason why the word shouldn't be pronounced as [strajpt], and
decided that from then on, that's how I've pronounced it. Cognitive
dissonance resolved! I was OK with [wIkId] for "wicked" and [crUkId] for
"crooked" because they were monomorphemic to me, but "striped" was
clearly "stripe" plus "ed".

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