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| Write Better Right Now (It Could Save Your Life) (under revision) by Mary Campbell |
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| Order or download this beautiful book of poems, prayers, meditations, songs, |
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| Unfamiliar Territory: Prayers, Meditations, and Songs, Vol. 1, by Mary Campbell |
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my life. That’s a small exaggeration; I probably didn’t use the word at all before high school. I doubt that I ever complained to Mom that my brother had ransacked my dresser drawers and left detritus in the wake of his illegal search. If he had done so, I wouldn’t have noticed. My bedroom was a monument to detritus. My mom dealt cleverly with the pile of rubbish that was my room; she closed the door. Mom was detritus-prone herself. I listen to numerous podcasts, and I had heard a podcaster pronounce detritus as DET-rit-us, rhyming more or less with “rest of us.” I’ve always said duh-TRY-tuss, as if it were an inflammatory disease: appendicitis, colitis, detritus. I’ve even written poems in which I rhymed detritus with something, as in “The light is bright on my de-TRY-tritus.” Was I going to have to change it, perhaps to “I’m so depressed about my DET-rit-us”? Today I googled detritus, and it turns out I was right all along. Duh-TRY-tuss it is. I'll sleep better tonight. TO AIR IS HUMAN English-speakers are forever mispronouncing things, especially if they (the English- speakers) read a lot. It’s bad enough that British and American pronunciations often differ for no good reason. But the notoriously complex English-language pronunciation issue is rooted in the history of English and its many borrowings from other languages. I treasure English for its eclectic origins, but they leave us with spellings that bear little relationship to pronunciation, as in through. Consider height and weight, chattel (pronounced CHAT-tle) and Mattel. If you encounter a printed word but never hear it spoken, you’re likely to pronounce it phonetically, or as nearly so as you can manage. When my daughter, Marian, was nine or ten years old, we were discussing her newest Nancy Drew book, The Clue of the Broken Locket (1934), and the characters therein—Nancy herself, of course, as well as Nancy’s father (eminent attorney Carson Drew), her friends (Bess Marvin and George Fayne), her sweetie pie (Ned Nickerson), the Drew family housekeeper (Hannah Gruen), and, in this book, someone called Gladys—which, as Marian pronounced it, rhymed with ladies. Of course it did. We’d all pronounce it that way if we’d never met a Gladys or watched an episode of the television show Bewitched featuring Samantha’s nosy neighbor, Gladys Kravitz. Coming across the name in a book, you’re not likely to “hear” GLAD-iss in your mind, but rather GLADE-eez or, at best, GLAD-eez. I don’t speak of “correct” pronunciation, since the English language is fluid and “correctness” changes from day to day. Moreover, most dictionaries no longer judge the speaking habits of their users, preferring to be descriptive rather than prescriptive.* If you look up the word err in a dictionary, the pronunciation guide shows er, ur, or ur, er, depending on the publisher. Twenty or thirty years ago, most dictionaries gave the “correct” pronunciation first, followed by “also” and other common but nonstandard ways of pronouncing the word. Now they offer pronunciation alternatives nonjudgmentally, although the standard (read “correct”) pronunciation usually appears first. If you want prescriptive advice on pronunciation, the best source I know of is Charles Harrington Elster’s delightful book There Is No Zoo in Zoology (which has been incorporated into The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations—The Complete Opinionated Guide). From the title alone, you learn that (a) zoo-OLL-uh-jee is just plain wrong and (b) Elster’s book will tell you how and why to say it (and hundreds of other words) right. (It’s zoe-OLL-uh-jee, with a long O in the first syllable.) As useful as the book is, you’ll be dismayed to find that you’ve been mispronouncing two-thirds of your vocabulary for your entire adult life. Still, I heartily recommend Mr. Elster's books and website. If you want a dictionary that guides rather than merely informs you about pronunciation, you’ll appreciate online audio guides. Google the word and hear the disembodied official internet voice, which offers only one pronunciation. Not all the online guides agree, however, as in the case of err. IF YOU CAN BE ENVELOPED, CAN YOU BE MAILED? Abused, misused, misunderstood ERR—It rhymes with fur, not hair, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, the Macmillan Dictionary, Charles Harrington Elster, and most (but not all) of the other sources I consulted. SHORT-LIVED (LONG-LIVED)—The I is long; lived rhymes with hived.
Ruling on the Written Word, by Mary Campbell |
I’ve said re-PRIZE and re-OCCUR and of-TEN and ho-MOJ-en-us. I’ve even been a CHAUVINIST. So ANYWAYS, I’m over it. |
or rubbish, especially left after a particular event (Cambridge Dictionary) |
actually composed of household detritus, including Christmas tree needles, discarded toddler toy parts, dryer lint, toenail clippings and human hair. (ripleys.com) |
Drew and her chums, Bess Marvin and George Fayne. The Nancy Drew series began in the 1920s, when few women had the freedom or the initiative shown by Nancy, presumably in her late teens yet permitted by her father, Carson Drew, to roam the countryside in her roadster looking for ne'er-do-wells of every stripe. She was a champion competitor in golf and tennis, seldom relying on her boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, for anything but chaste companionship on weekends and during the summer, when Ned was home from college. |
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