It's Wednesday—time for Peeves Unleashed!
Just going off
It’s the middle of the regular work week, and all stupid camel jokes aside, there is room for a little angst.
We all know that language evolves, and that’s fine: it’s a living entity. We might have different levels of ease with letting go of old friends, and getting on board with new ones (I’ll admit, it took me a few years to begrudgingly accept texted). Either way, there are things that make us apoplectic, so this is where we’ll write that list in digital blood—for therapeutic mental health purposes, of course.
I’m referring to more than simple transgressions. These are things we see and hear on an all-too-regular basis which have bona fide potential for miscommunication, not just the personal grievances of finger-wagging persnickety grammar police who want to feel superior. It’s the Eats, Shoots and Leaves kind of thing. Even if it doesn’t quite reach that level of gravity, though, we’ll throw down the insults to language which make us feel mildly homicidal, in the spirit of sharing our pain with those who understand us.
Fewer than half of American adults can name the three branches of government. I remember when Leno had a segment on The Tonight Show called “Jay Walking,” during which he would venture outside the studio to ask random people an excessively simple question. Outside a post office, he asked a guy, “How many stars are on the United States flag?” Looking up, the guy said, “It’s moving around too fast for me to count.”
To the list of unpardonable ignorance, I am adding the mispronunciation of the word nuclear. Yes, we’ve shortened it to nuke, so I know how it started. Of course, it didn’t help matters to have a president called Dubya who kept saying nuke-yeller (unless maybe he was referring to Kim Jong Il’s infantile bombast; not a big mystery where junior gets it).
As to the color of nuclear warheads, I have it on firsthand authority that they are not, in fact, ‘yeller,’ but lime green—at least at a very specific launch site I will decline to identify. Moreover, it is no small irony that #43 had the power to launch them, yet lacked a basic understanding of whence comes their power.
Interestingly, most of the word nuclear contains the word clear. So, even if a speaker were unaware that nucleus refers to the center bits of not just an atom, but also an amoeba and most of the rest of the structure of, for example, life—I would not begrudge the loss of three fully enunciated distinct syllables. In fact, I would almost gleefully settle for new-clear in a syllabic Texas two-step, if only those pesky middle sounds were in the right order.
Although I have no research to support my theory, I am going to posit that one of the reasons some people who slaughter the word do so, is that they haven’t seen it in print. Maybe ever. That is tragic in its own separate discussion of literacy and reading as a means of learning and new ideas.
Meanwhile, however, I am absolutely going to hold responsible those in the public sphere—whether broadcasting, podcasting, newscasting, forecasting, sportscasting, typecasting, or fly casting, to pronounce this very small word, with very big import, correctly.
Post Script: I highly recommend the following by fellow Substack author, Stephen Schiff, who writes Closing the Loop
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