'Lessons'
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
This is why that 100 words list is crap.
Yeah, I was reading the list and I was thinking that some of these pronunciations were perfectly acceptable in any dictionary you look.
Great example: often. I say "offen", but I know it's correct to say "often" (even if it irritates me). The list says the former is the only correct way.
The list is absolutely right where it agrees with me:
barbituRate, RRRRRate
. . . and absolutely wrong where it doesn't. Yeah, you shouldn't say "card shark" when you mean "cardsharp", but "card shark" has a perfectly valid meaning (to me, at least) of "person who is very good at some card game or another". Note the lack of trickiness in definition.
(And, hey, look, that other link agrees with me. Cool. I didn't read it first, honest.)
Side note: people have been saying "aks" for 1000 years? Huh. Well, 1000 years ago, "ask" and "ax" might've been synonyms.
I always liked the origin of the word "nickname"--it started out as "an ekename" in Middle English ("eke" meaning "also"), and then the consonant drifted from the article to the noun. Very cool.
"Pernickety" surprised me. No idea that extra "s" (as in persnickety) was not supposed to be there.
Oh no! I refuse. This is where I draw the line. I love the "s". The "s" makes it all snarky. The "s" allows you to relish saying that word -- "You're so per-SNICK-itey!"
In fact, that's what I'm being right now in refusing to accept this change. Persnickitey. Definitely not pernickitey.
Pernickitey is NOT a word. Persnickitey is. I have spoken, and so it shall be. Bleah t sticks tongue at stupid rule-making people
sits with Kathy
Jeez, I had a basically European upbringing and I learned the damned word without an S. That is neither an attempt to rule out anyone else's S, nor a hanging matter.
Well, I just finished GGK's The Last Light of the Sun. I'm not horribly horribly broken like I usually am at the end of a Kay book, but that sense of longing and wistfulness that he always invokes at the end of a journey is there, just kind of sweet and sad, haunting in the background like music. It's a relief and a disappointment at the same time. It feels like he stayed his hand, but you could tell the strength was there, unexercised. I feel like he wanted to tell more of a story of ordinary people's lives, caught up in fate, then returned to life, so he didn't quite crank the power all the way up. Pretty damned cool.
That is neither an attempt to rule out anyone else's S
Thank god, because my name would look silly without my S....
Tho' I could switch to Teppy.
Pernicketeppy?