precipee

[Mark Mandel]

Looks like an extension of what I think of as "French loanword final
consonant deletion", as in /ku: d@ gra:/ ("koo duh grah") for "coup de
grace". At some point the speaker (or an antecedent in the oral transmission
chain) learned that "French final consonants aren't pronounced" -- a
beginner's rule of thumb for French orthography -- and misapplied it to
consonant *sounds*. I don't think of "precipice" as being French any more,
but maybe this person did.

m a m

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 3:56 PM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Ken Rogoff is professor of economics and public policy at Harvard. Unless
> I'm going deef, I heard just him say on CNN that, before the stimulus
> package, the U.S. economy had been "on a / 'prEsIpi /."
>
> Then he said it again even more clearly. Obviously impossible.
>
> Isn't it?
>
>
> JL
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

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