Heard on NOVA:

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jul 29 07:25:04 UTC 2011


On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> quoted:
> but Wilson is saying that he learned the /t/, not the /kt/, pronunciation, and still considers *that* to be correct.

Well, as King Knut learned, there's no holding back the tide. When I
read a paper by a linguist bemoaning the fact that her analysis of
English "erroneously" predicts the occurrence of the "incorrect" form,
[artIk], I realized that the war, not to speak of the battle, was
lost. Let's just say that I *prefer* the K-less pronunciation.:-)

Got dammit! As soon as I was able to read, I knew that [arktIk], on
the basis of the spelling, had to be the correct pronunciation, and
not the [ar.tIk] that everybody was using, sixty-plus years ago. But
they metaphorically beat it out of me.

BTW, arnold, I, too, thank you for the cite. A very interesting
arcticle <har! har!>, as were the comments.

FWIW, until I read it, I had been *fully* persuaded that that the word
was [kloUs]-minded, i.e. that the correct *spelling* was
_close_-minded, even though I must have *read* "_closed_-minded"
hundreds of thousands of times.

I possibly have some trivial neural glitch. I once thought that, in
like manner, there was no C in the spelling and no [k] in the
pronunciation of _encroach_. When, one day, I somehow suddenly noticed
the C, I simply assumed that there were two words with the same
meaning, _*enroach_ and _encroach_. Like _flavor_ and _flavour_ or
some such. There could have been.

Youneverknow.

--
-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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