Heard on [adult swim]: "clique" > [klik]

[Alison Murie]

On May 20, 2009, at 3:38 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Heard on [adult swim]: "clique" > [klik]
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>
> When I knew "clique" only from reading, during the '40's I assumed
> that "cleek" - cf. "Cliquot Club" and la veuve Cliquot - was the
> pronunciation. By the time that I reached high school, "clique" was in
> common use, but pronounced "click"! I assumed that this was the BE
> (mis)pronunciation. But I was soon amazed to discover that "click" was
> also the pronunciation used by the white guys at my high school! Over
> the course of the years, till early this morning, I'd never heard  ,/
>   _clique_ pronounced except as "click" by *anyone*, regardless of
> race, creed, color, or sexual orientation.
>
> As ("... among the young"?! I'm 72, the approximate age of everyone
> who was in high school ca. 1950-1954) claims found in books, how does
> a person decide whether some claim is prescriptive untruth, whereas
> another random published claim is descriptive truth?
> It's like religion. One is true. The others are mythology,
>
> Who is it that decides that X is the primary or preferred
> pronunciation and on what basis does he make this decision
>
> -Wilson
> ~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm not sure where my "cleek" pronunciation came from -- possibly my
parents -- but the "click" pronunciation struck me as hick, when I was
a kid.
I'm a few years older than Wilson, but click reigned in my highschools
NE, IL & WN), too.
AM
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
> wrote:
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>> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
>> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Heard on [adult swim]: "clique" > [klik]
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> On May 19, 2009, at 10:01 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Spoken by a character in an animated cartoon:
>>>
>>> "They're all members of the Venture _clique [klik]_."
>>>
>>>
>>> I don't think that I've ever heard "clique" pronounced as other than
>>> [klIk] before.
>>
>> [i] was the original. Â the OED has only [i], NOAD2 and AHD4 have
>> it as
>> the first alternative. MWDEU:
>>
>> Â  The only dispute over _clique_ seems to be the appropriateness of
>> the anglicized pronunciation [with [I]] for this word imported from
>> the French in the 18th century [OED first cite in 1711]. Â By now the
>> anglicized pronunciation must be judged acceptable, even if it is
>> less
>> frequent than [the pronunciation with [i]].
>>
>> .....
>>
>> _Garner's Modern American Usage_ Â (p. 155) accepts both
>> pronunciations, but says that the one with [i] is "the preference of
>> most cultivated speakers". Â this sort of sniffiness against
>> anglicized
>> pronunciations is not uncommon.
>>
>> i don't know when the [I] pronunciation first appeared, or what its
>> current frequency is in what groups (though my impression is that
>> it's
>> very widespread among the young in the U.S.).
>>
>> arnold
>>
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