Jack Windsor Lewis (here) either acclaims me as or accuses me of – according to your point of view – being a champion player of the rant against unusual pronunciations. He also names John Maidment in the same context. I can’t speak for John, of course, but my rants are always aimed at people who are speaking professionally and publicly, and who therefore (in my view) should take care that the style of speech they use, including the pronunciation of individual words, is not going to interfere with the transmission of information. Unusual pronunciations, in my opinion, hinder this by making the listener (and I include television viewers as listeners in this case) concentrate on the form of the communication rather than its content. In a parallel way, professional writers need to use both traditional orthography and accepted ’standard’ grammar in their published work, unless they specify otherwise – as Jack does for his blog.

This, therefore, is not a rant, but an observation. I was recently at a concert where the artists introduced each item with a short talk about either the composer or the work they were about to play, or both. In introducing a string quartet by Shostakovich, one of the quartet members said that the composer had been /kəʊˈhɜːst/ by the Soviet government into making statements and writing certain pieces of music. This is an unusual pronunciation of the word coerced, and I wondered how it had arisen. She was not a professional speaker, and possibly unused to addressing an audience, so it may not be surprising that she ‘mis-spoke’ (in the manner of some American presidents).

Two possible sources for the mistake come to mind – rehearse, which is a word very familiar to musicians, and cohere. Add to that the thousand-year struggle for the /h/ phoneme to retain its ‘proper’ place in English phonology, and it is quite understandable that confusion should reign, and a nervous speaker opt for the unexpected usage I, and about seventy other people, heard.

On the other hand, if it had been a BBC presenter …

I don’t know why, after all these years, I should still be surprised by odd pronunciations, but I am. Two that have recently come my way, both from the BBC, are eviscerate, pronounced /iˈvɪskəreɪt/ by Simon Sebag Montefiore presenting the first of a series of programmes on the history of Jerusalem, and cholera, pronounced /kəˈlɛərə/ by Sharanjit Leyl as presenter of a programme on BBC World.

Mr (Dr?) Sebag Montefiore is a historian, educated at Harrow and Gonville & Caius, Cambridge. I think we can assume that he therefore learned some Latin at school and maybe he now believes that all Latin words used in English should be pronounced as if they were still Latin. I wonder how he pronounces the name of his old college?

Sharanjit Leyl, a native Singaporean, has clearly, from her accent, spent almost all her life in English-speaking environments. Has she never heard anyone pronounce the word cholera?

Neither of these two words is what you might call ‘rare’. Shouldn’t someone in the production team be listening and persuading the broadcasters to use pronunciations which do not cause the viewer/listener to concentrate on the form rather than the content of what they are saying?

A former Presentation Editor of Radio 3 used to listen to every word his team uttered on air, and sent notes each time he heard something untoward. When I was Pronunciation Adviser, I would send notes similarly with my “advice”. I can’t believe that anyone does this now. There is no longer a Pronunciation Adviser, and while the members of the Pronunciation Unit are all highly qualified and very good at what they do,  I’m not sure that their management (who are not linguists, but administrators – “I’m a manager, therefore I can manage anything”) would take kindly to such notes going out in any form. I hope I am wrong.

I thought that would get your attention!

The substance that these controversial objects are made from is causing some confusion. There are two separate materials: silicon and silicone.

Silicon is a non-metallic element, symbolised by Si, used for its properties as a semi-conductor in electronic circuits, and therefore in the insides of whatever device you are reading this on. It is a gritty sort of material. Its pronunciation is /ˈsɪlɪkən/ with a neutral schwa in the final syllable.

Silicone is a polymer: a material composed of long chains of alternate silicon and oxygen atoms, which is generally inert (i.e. it doesn’t react easily with anything). This makes it suitable for use in medical applications. In its gel form it is used in such things as breast implants. The pronunciation is /ˈsɪlɪkəʊn/ – note that the final syllable has the GOAT vowel.

Many commentators on BBC Radio today have been talking about the present situation, and discussing whether women who have had /ˈsɪlɪkən/ implants should have them removed. If any woman has really had a/ˈsɪlɪkən/ implant, I should think she has a very good case to sue for serious medical malpractice.

John Wells’  blog post yesterday deals with ejectives in English. He’s kind enough to mention my own post on this subject some time ago, but I’m surprised he believes that I think it’s a recent phenomenon. I wrote then “I suppose I first became properly aware of ejectives being used in English about twenty years ago”. I put this down to my own lack of attention to what’s going on. Later in the post I wrote “My impression is that they must have arisen some time ago”.

I didn’t suggest that they were new then, and I went on to mention the earliest I was aware of being Lionel Jeffries in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang which was filmed in 1968. I suppose it depends on how recent you mean “recent”  to be: some years ago it was suggested that I give a repeat talk to a local organisation. Someone on the committee asked if it wasn’t a bit soon to ask me back. My proposer said “if 17 years is a bit soon, then I suppose so.” Lionel Jeffries was not a young man in 1968, and we can assume that he had been using ejectives in the appropriate position for most of his life by then.

I remember David Abercrombie saying that he believed that pre-glottalisation started with people born after 1926 (the year that Lionel Jeffries was born, by coincidence). How he could be so certain about that as an absolute date, I have no idea, but if he was right, then it would follow that the ejectives appeared some time later. Is this recent? In terms of the whole history of the English language, of course it is, but 1926 is now before most of us were born (except the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, of course), so in that sense, not recent at all.

I’m delighted that John is bringing out a new edition of Accents of English. Thirty years between editions is far too long!

For the benefit of those who can’t receive BBC1 television, I shall start by saying that Garrow’s Law is a period courtroom drama, set in late 18th entury London. Garrow is a young barrister intent on improving the quality of justice for poorer people, and he is based, apparently, on a real person.

The developing plotline concerns his relationship with the wife of Sir Arthur Hill, and here is my problem: the BBC takes great pains to get the period detail correct in costume, stage setting and the like, but obviously this can’t be carried to the lengths of having everyone speak in 18th century London accents (in the same way, both British TV series of Maigret, starring Rupert Davies in the 1960s, and Michael Gambon in the 1990s also accepted that it was unrealistic to affect French accents). We’re now getting to my linguistic point.

The wife of Sir Arthur, who is either a knight or a baronet (which is hereditary), is regularly referred to as “Lady Sarah”. She has been thrown out of her home by Sir Arthur, on the grounds of her supposed adultery with Garrow, and deprived of her child (who although claimed by Sir Arthur to be  Garrow’s, is being brought up by Sir Arthur). The correct usage for the wife of a knight or baronet is not “Lady Sarah”, but “Lady Hill”. For her to be “Lady Sarah”, she would have to hold the title in her own right, as the daughter of an Earl, Marquis or Duke. If she is the latter, where is her family? Shouldn’t they be defending her against Sir Arthur? If she is so aristocratic, I think we should be told. If she has no family, and was ‘elevated’ to her position simply by marriage to Sir Arthur, then she is being wrongly addressed and talked about by the whole cast.

Whichever is the back story, something is missing.

Sad, aren’t I?

A report on BBC’s regional news programme for East Anglia yesterday evening (10 November 2011), and unfortunately not available for watching again after 6 o’clock GMT on 11 November (so you can’t check what I’m about to say after that time) drew attention to a potential breakthrough in the treatment and prevention of malaria by using the properties of a protein. The research is being carried out at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge.

The reporter said “Carried in the blood, scientists have been struggling to find a way of stopping that parasite invading our red blood cells.”

Nuff said.

Caroline Hawley, reporting from Libya for the BBC has a couple of times recently said that the new rulers had “wrestled” control of the country from Gaddafi.

She is not, of course, the only person to confuse the two words wrest and wrestle, to the extent that it can’t be long before the OED has to recognise that there is a phrasal verb to “wrestle from”. However, at the moment, there is no entry under wrestle which quite fits the bill here, and the meaning “To usurp, arrogate, or take by force (power, a right, etc.); to assume forcibly (a dignity or office); to seize, capture, or take (lands, dominion, etc.) from another or others” is limited to wrest(4) where we read “In very frequent use (esp. with from) since c1820″.

Wrest is not a common word in other contexts, whereas wrestle is a word that we see most days, with one use or another, but it would be a shame if wrest were to disappear completely, when it has existed since Anglo-Saxon and Viking times alongside wrestle, which originally implied ‘wresting’ on a continuous basis – wresting was a single action, wrestling a process.

Standing in the check-out queue at my local supermarket yesterday afternoon, I noticed that the person behind me was buying a Jamie Oliver knife block set.

Like many products these days, it is labelled in several languages. The German, however, was easier to understand than usual. Why does it say that the product is “must-have”, and why is it a “set”? What’s wrong with the word “unentbehrlich”, or some other equivalent, and wouldn’t “Garnitur” fit the bill for ’set’? My German is not very good, so there may be a perfectly reasonable explanation for the use of English words in this context, but if someone English were to use foreign words in such a way, then they would be considered to be very uppish, and the reaction would be “Oooh, get you!”.

We’re all used to the so-called intrusive r in English – the ‘r’ pronounced after a word ending in /ɑː, ɔː, ɜː, ə/ when the following word also begins with a vowel. A few days ago, I heard one which was new to me, although perhaps it has just passed me by until now. Mark Easton, the BBC’s Home Editor, was talking about the possible eviction of travellers from Dale Farm in Essex, and he used the phrase ‘dénouement of …’

The intrusive r between these two words was unusual for me, as he clearly used a French-type nasalized vowel at the end of the first word: /deˈnuːmãrəv/. (Apologies for using /ã/ – I’m not sure how to add an accent immediately above a vowel.) I’m not aware that I’ve ever heard a nasalized vowel followed by an intrusive r before. If he had used a final /ŋ/, which the EPD allows as a possible English pronunciation – although neither ODP nor LPD gives this option – then an intrusive r would have been impossible.

I haven’t examined any of the literature on English pronunciation, but I don’t recall this possibility being mentioned. No doubt someone reading this will be able to point me to a reference.

The newspapers and news and current affairs programmes this week are full of Labour “apologising” for the mistakes they made during their period of office between 1997 and 2010. I do not remember politicians ever apologising for their own actions in government over the time when I have been taking an interest (about 50 years). They may apologise for slavery, which ended in Britain in the 18th century, although the slave trade went on until 1806, but that is an easy thing to do – no one can even remember a family member who was involved, they all died so long ago; but to apologise for things you did, or didn’t do, ten years ago – that is something new in my experience.

But something else changed when Labour came to office in 1997. Ministers when interviewed about their policies always insisted that this was the “right” thing to do. From Tony Blair to, especially, Gordon Brown, and all their subordinates, they one and all arrogantly suggested that having considered all the alternative policies, there was only one right course of action, and this was it. However arrogant the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major may have been, my recollection is that they only ever claimed that their policies were the best options, wording which allows more wriggle room if they subsequently need to be changed.

Perhaps if Labour had stuck to this less definite phraseology, they would not now be apologising for getting it wrong.

I’m surprised that no political commentators seem to have picked up on this.