referencebooks (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} referencebooks) wrote,@ 2005-11-22 13:54:00 |
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The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations
The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide for the Careful Speaker
By Charles Harrington Elster.
Published by Houghton Mifflin, 1999.
This is a 6" by 9" paperback book running to 426 pages including the bibliograph and a glossary, plus an introduction and a guide to the pronunciation notation used throughout the book.
What the book is is an entertaining guide to the proper pronunciation of some commonly mispronounced words.
Some readers would find this book irritating and snobby, as many prescriptive language books are. For example, there are many cases in the book where the author (who is as opinionated as the subtitle indicates) claims that a word is pronounced incorrectly by 90% of the population. This shows the book to be elitist in intent, really for an audience that wants to feel superior to others. I'm someone who likes to know the proper spelling, usage and pronunciation of words, but even I found myself irritated by the author's upper-class, British, hyper-proper tone (and the books is primarily about American, rather than British, pronunciation). Nevertheless I couldn't put the book down. His discussion of the proper pronunciation of words and the differing opinions of the major authorities and related issues is fascinating and informative. I was surprised to find out how many words I normally mispronounce. His digressions, which are frequent, are also very interesting. (For example, were you aware of Phyfe's rule? That's a rule of thumb regarding English words of two syllables that have a use both as nouns or adjectives and as verbs. According to Phyfe's rule, to which there are many exceptions, words like this have the stress on the first syllable when used as a noun or an adjective and on the second syllable when used as a verb. Some examples are "produce," "detail," "insult," "intrigue," "annex," convert," "object," "perfume," and "rebel.")
The pronunciation notations are simple and clear, employing common-sense English spellings for sounds and using capitalization and bold type to indicate stress. These notations are given for both correct and common incorrect pronunciations (for example: "irony EYE-ruh-nee (like the name Ira + knee). Don't say EYE-ur-nee.")
For a sense of what's included, here are the first fifteen words in the "F" sequence:
- facet
- faience
- faineant
- fait accompli
- familial
- farrago
- February
- fecal
- fecund
- fellatio
- feral
- ferment
- fetid
- fetish
- fief
The choice of words included is somewhat arbitrary, and many commonly misprounounced words, or words pronounced differently by different groups, can be thought of that weren't included. In particular, there are a couple of issues around pronunciation that I find interesting and would like to have seen dealt with somewhere in the book, and those are two questions that seem to relate to class and geography. First there's the case of a number of words that can be stressed on the first or second syllable, like "insurance" and "excess," where stressing the first syllable can sound less pretentious or just more white trash depending on the word and on who you are, and stressing the second syllable can sound either more correct or just pretentious, again depending on the word and on who you are. Second is a number of words that are sometimes pronounced with a short a (like "ham") and sometimes with a long a (like "calm") depending primarily on region within the U.S., but also, I think, on whether you imagine Britain or Continental Europe as the true source of proper pronunciation of words of foreign origin (words like "balsamic" and "Iran"). The author doesn't look into general questions such as these, except just a little bit in passing in discussions of particular words.
In general, the book skims over a lot of issues that would be of interest to sociolinguistics. In fact, the book as a whole would be interesting to some sociolinguistics as an example of how pronunciation communicates class identity. The book would have a strong appeal to people who suffer from class anxiety.
Though it's not exactly authoritative, nor does it really pretend to be, it's a useful book for information on the "proper" pronunciation of words in American speech (or someone's idea of proper pronunciation).
