So something very specific has been irritating me. It's when people get all heated up over the way that people other than themselves pronounce words.
You know how it goes. One only has to say the word "scone" for half of the room to shudder dramatically and say "that's not how you pronounce scone!". The other half of the room will then invariably rise to the insult, saying "yes it is! I don't what kind of weird way you're pronouncing it!" The entire conversation will then descend into passive-aggressive tribalist madness, and you will sit there nibbling at your scon/scoan, silently ashamed for bringing the matter up.
The passion with which some can slug out verbal battles over the way people say words completely baffles me. I mean, pronounciation, literally, doesn't matter. Grammar matters. Spelling, usually, matters. Word choice matters, if only because it serves as an interesting way to view the soul of mankind. But the variation in the way people pronounce words, literally, has no significance. It does not affect the quality of interpersonal communication, since we always know which words the other person means (granted, if someone did something like pronounce "house" as "hoo-say", we might have a problem, but this never happens, so it is unimportant). It's not interesting to discuss, either: we learn that people from different places or with different regional ancestry say things differently at the rough age of five, and there is no grander conclusion that scon vs scoan arguments reach. It's a complete waste of time and brain power.
I'm concerned that people's concern for "correct" pronounciation may come from nothing but a delusional sense of superiority. It's difficult for any of us to get rid of the gut reaction of "how dare these people have ways different from mine! My [accent/politics/religious views] are a result of how I was brought up, and no-one can have been brought up better than I!" Etc. Which is silly. There is no "better" way of pronouncing scone, or vase, or whatever the other points of contention are.
Really, there are just better things to spend our energy discussing. Blogging about it probably isn't helping on that front. But whatever.
You know how it goes. One only has to say the word "scone" for half of the room to shudder dramatically and say "that's not how you pronounce scone!". The other half of the room will then invariably rise to the insult, saying "yes it is! I don't what kind of weird way you're pronouncing it!" The entire conversation will then descend into passive-aggressive tribalist madness, and you will sit there nibbling at your scon/scoan, silently ashamed for bringing the matter up.
The passion with which some can slug out verbal battles over the way people say words completely baffles me. I mean, pronounciation, literally, doesn't matter. Grammar matters. Spelling, usually, matters. Word choice matters, if only because it serves as an interesting way to view the soul of mankind. But the variation in the way people pronounce words, literally, has no significance. It does not affect the quality of interpersonal communication, since we always know which words the other person means (granted, if someone did something like pronounce "house" as "hoo-say", we might have a problem, but this never happens, so it is unimportant). It's not interesting to discuss, either: we learn that people from different places or with different regional ancestry say things differently at the rough age of five, and there is no grander conclusion that scon vs scoan arguments reach. It's a complete waste of time and brain power.
I'm concerned that people's concern for "correct" pronounciation may come from nothing but a delusional sense of superiority. It's difficult for any of us to get rid of the gut reaction of "how dare these people have ways different from mine! My [accent/politics/religious views] are a result of how I was brought up, and no-one can have been brought up better than I!" Etc. Which is silly. There is no "better" way of pronouncing scone, or vase, or whatever the other points of contention are.
Really, there are just better things to spend our energy discussing. Blogging about it probably isn't helping on that front. But whatever.
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