“Spelling is the art of dividing words into their proper syllables in order to find their true pronunciation,” he writes. The tone of his instructions to the teacher is often ill-tempered, as if he expected opposition. “To attack deep rooted prejudices and oppose the current of opinion, is a task of great difficulty and hazard,” he writes, summarizing the murderous thoughts of thwarted, self-righteous copy editors: “Even errour becomes too sacred to be violated by the assaults of innovation.” He fulminates in the introduction: “The sound of the half-vowels is obvious in the words feeble, baptism, heaven. . . . Some people, finding a little difficulty in pronouncing the half-vowels, give the full sound of e before them, thus feebel, heaven, &c. which is an errour that ought to be corrected in infancy.” His footnotes, too, are passionate. He puts an asterisk next to “mercy,” “perfect,” and “person,” and rails, “These words are vulgarly pronounced marcy, parfect, parson, &c. This is a vicious habit, contracted by carelessness, which destroys the beauty of pronunciation by giving the vowel wrong sound and wrong quantity. It is an errour universal among inaccurate speakers to sound e before r like a; I therefore request, once for all, that it may be attended to.”
Considering that the Blue-Back was aimed at schoolchildren, I wasn’t expecting to learn much from it. I noted what words got Webster’s goat when his students mispronounced them (children in colonial times made some of the same mistakes kids make today: “punkin” for “pumpkin” and “chimbley” for “chimney”). But as I paged through the book, I gradually compiled a long list of words that I’d been mispronouncing all my life, at least mentally—many of them I’d never had the occasion or the nerve to pronounce out loud. For instance, nobody says “huzza” anymore, so how was I to know that it has its accent on the last syllable, like “hurrah”? “Uxorious,” meaning “excessively attentive to one’s wife,” has a soft u; it’s not “you-xorious.” (I once asked a married man if there was a word for a woman who was excessively attentive to her husband, and he said, “Yes: wonderful.”) And “elegiac” is pronounced “e-LEE-gi-ac”? I’ve always said “el-e-JIE-ac,” and would look askance at anyone who pronounced it “e-LEE-gi-ac,” except as a joke. “Chimaera” begins with a “k” sound (it’s Greek) and takes its accent on the second syllable: “chi-MAE-ra.” I always thought it was “shimmera”—accent on the first syllable, a pronunciation that may be wrong but is more evocative of the word’s meaning: something illusory and a bit monstrous.
Before encountering the Blue-Back, I thought I had reached the bottom of the well of mispronunciation. I had learned the three D’s: “desultory” (“DEZ-ul-to-ry”; I always think it’s “de-ZUL-to-ry”), “disheveled” (“di-SHEV-eld,” not “dis-HEAV-eld”), and “detritus” (“de-TRY-tus,” not “DET-ri-tus”). Now every day I hear a new one. On The Simpsons, Lisa remarks on Homer’s rationale for stealing cable TV: “Dad, that sounds spurious.” (“Thank you, Lisa,” he replies.) The u has the y sound, as in “curious.” I’d been pronouncing it as if it meant “of or relating to spurs.” As long as I was looking up the pronunciation of “spurious,” I read the definition and etymology: it means “false” and is from the Latin for “bastard.” Thank you, Lisa.
One thing I will say for Webster’s online dictionary: many words come not just with a phonetic rendering of the pronunciation but with an icon that you can click on to hear someone pronounce the word for you. This could have saved me countless instances of embarrassment when I have laughed out loud at someone who was pronouncing something correctly.
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