TheMommyBlog

My mom is an English prof, too. I’ll have to see how I do. So far I got all your sample questions wrong ... :-(

Oh,I fail badly!I say those that you do as well as a few others including “bob wire”.lol
I have an excuse you see…I’m from the south..lol

We were going over these this morning as well from the yahoo daily picks. I came out ok (I’m also guilty of spitting image) but we were mostly laughing at some of the mispronounciations. Especially the one for Law & Order.

I fall pretty short on the mark on those.  I added an extra letter into pernickety - and say “pershnickety” instead.  My mom gave me that one - note that she was not an english prof, however.

Speaking as someone with a linguistics degree (whatever that means), language is constantly evolving.  There typically are two camps:  The prescriptivists and the “it’s all language dood” camp.

Prescriptivists like to convince you that there is ONE WAY to do things, and that if it was good enough for people in the past, it should be good enough for us now.  In my opinion, that’s simply not true.  Language is a product of its speakers.  That means that if most people who are speaking a particular language say something one way, then that’s the way to say it.  So if everyone you know says “persnickity” and they know what you mean; and most people you encounter have never even heard “pernickity” then the word has evolved to “persnickity”.  This is how language evolves.

I can’t even type pernikity let alone say it…

Wow…I had no clue that is how you really say those words. I think persnickety sounds cooler, and spitting image is easier to say ;) I will stick to the Livikian way of saying it.