WHY PRONOUNCE INCORRECTLY?
By Prof. W. E. Watt
[Prof. W. E. Watt, in Primary Education.] It makes us warm to see teachers, elocutionists, and lecturers, who are supposed to lead public thought and whose business it is to furnish patterns of correctness, going about with incorrect expressions on their lips which the least listening on their part when in really cultivated company might correct. For instance, there is that class of people who persist in saying "like" when they mean "as." They "look like" they never can learn a simple rule of grammar. "To hear a teacher correct a child for saying, "I eat my dinner," with short e in eat, and say, "You talk like you don't try to improve," increases our temperature. "Eat" pronounced as "et" is bad form. It was once good, but now no one uses it in careful speech. But the use of "like" has positive limits, and they may be learned by a teacher quite as readily as the pronunciation of any verb. Look at the crowd who continue to speak "with" so as to rhyme it with "pith!" What can be done with them? Of course their way of speaking this little word is better than "wid" or "wit;" but it looks as if the speaker were trying hard not to say15"wit" or "wid" when he strains himself to say it without carrying the subvocal tone into the consonant. It would be pleasanter to the ear to hear Sam Weller's "vith." What a difference there is in special teachers! Years ago when some of the physical culture special teachers were doing a little alternating, one of them was told once that "alter" as part of a word is not pronounced the same as when a whole word. A word to the wise was sufficient. But the teachers of "alt" still twist the thoughts of the children into thinking they are ILLUstrating things when they are really ILLUstrating them. What shall we do with the people who say ADdress when they mean adDRESS? The mispronunciation clings to them as if it were put there with CEMent. They are the same individuals who say Idea when they mean iDEa. I suppose they found out some time ago that "area" has its penult accented, and they can't get away from the one when they strain at the other. Perhaps their Ideas are more like Areas—having nothing in them. And what a spectacle a man makes of himself when he gets the notion that the natural crasis between t or d and the following u in many words should not be! He picks out the words he means to get desperate about, and then you hear him act in speaking as a boy does who trips himself and almost falls, but doesn't quite go flat. He gets the thing right in "nature" and "creature," and possibly in "furniture," but nine out of ten of them throw away the initial sound of u in "furniture" to save their pneumatic equilibrium by going wrong in order to get what they think must be right. Their "furnitoor" sounds like the Dutchman's moosic. But the whole tribe of them go floundering when they are speaking on "edyoucation" and hit the word "grajiuate" somewhat suddenly. If they only knew how miserable they seem to their best friends, and if they could be persuaded to see that some crasis is permissible there, how much pain and mortification could be avoided in this vale of tears! Did you ever hand one of these persons an "envelope," or an "envelop"? Not one of them has ever learned the French nasal n; but every last one of them has the pachydermatous determination to sound it this time or die a-sounding at it. Envelope is properly spoken as it spells, and anything that envelops may be called an envelop in plain United States; but if you have to be French part of the time you may as well be it right here as anywhere.