Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Enjoying the "How Do You Pronounce" Threads

Also, in Alaska the town is pronounced Valdeez, not Valdez. The book "Eats, shoots and leaves" goes into a lot about punctuation.
pak

Very good book, that.

Two that I'm often asked about �

� Which is correct, "I feel bad" or "I feel badly?"
It's exactly the same familiar grammatical construction as "I feel old," "I feel tired," "I feel sad," "I feel happy," "I feel sick," "I feel sleepy enough to sleep all week," and "I feel sore all over" � "I feel bad."
This construction uses bad as a predicate adjective, not badly as an adverb. The predicate adjective applies to the subject, I, not to the verb, feel.



� Which is correct, "long-LIVVed" or "long-LIEved?"
In this construction, the noun life has become a participle (as if it were derived from a verb) that's used here as an adjective. The f is softened into a v, as it does when the singular hoof becomes the plural hooves � "long-LIEved," to rhyme with derived and survived.

Also, "could care less" is a meaningless result of careless failure to think about or to understand what you're saying � a corruption of the original, expressive "couldn't care less."

Maybe not pronunciation, exactly, but I've noticed a lot of people writing "then" when they should use the word "than."
Quite a few run a lot together as in alot of people.
And, why do some people insist on putting an apostrophe before the last "S" in a word when it is not possessive or a contraction?
The English language is bastardized enough already!
OK, rant off now.

Teacher was talking about ignorance and apathy being the world's two worst problems when she noticed that Willie was asleep. She woke him up.

"Wille, what are the two biggest problems in the world today?"

"I don't know, and I don't care."

Yep.

I always told my students that writing "alot" will be grounds for placement in the vaporization chamber when I become King of the World.

The poor apostrophe gets more abuse than any other mark of punctuation. (You didn't even mention the billions of times each day that "it's" is used as a possessive.)

Misuse of "then" and "than" is an irritant to me.

The use of borrow when one means lend drives me nuts e.g. "Will you borrow me $5," and is something I've only run into locally.

Around here we have numerous people who claim to itch a scratch. (I always thought that was the name of that thing from Ohio Art.) I suppose that if they were careless with a sharp object they would cut a bandage, or if it was bad enough they would wound a stitch.

"To no end" � with no purpose
"No end" � with no limit

"Bring" � carry from there to here
"Take" � carry from here to there

Ken, what do you think about the recent trend of using "smartly" in place of "intelligently" or "cleverly"? Example: Jim smartly decided not to tell his wife that the new pants she wore made her butt look big.

I was brought up to believe that "smartly" meant briskly or quickly.

That � briskly, crisply � has always been my understanding, too � but I suspect that the sense that you're asking about is probably a resurrection of the archaic original meaning, long obscured by the much more common recent off-shoot.

� gives a whole new dimension of connotation to "The private saluted the general smartly," doesn't it?

When I overheard an airline passenger talking about the difficulties of getting his "eye sacks" through the baggage inspection, I thought I was listening to a taxidermist or a glass eye maker.

Then he mentioned climbing Mt Hood.

Mishearing can be as strange as mispronouncing.

Bruce

One of the first things that I learned as a singer was to put a definite space, however brief, between words � a point that a short-lived TV commercial recently brought alive again with the voice-over repeatedly stressing "fifty percen toff!" (With an extra-strong t, to boot!)

It's easy to see how "ice axe" could come across to a hearer as "eye sacks."

That brings to mind the old tv commecials for the compilations of recorded music, greatest hits collections featuring a list of the performers included, plus "Minnie Moore!" Can anyone name her hit record?

Then there was the Sunday-School kid who drew an airplane to illustrate Joseph and Mary's flight into Egypt and included, in the cockpit, Pontius the pilot.

And the first-grader who drew an airplane adorned with apples and oranges � the fruited plane, of course!

One more you guys can help me out with...
I've always been inclined to pronounce Ingwe as Tom but how would a guy really say it?

Alox.

Is it a-lox with an "a" like in Dad or Ay-lox like the "a" in day?

Or since it's supposed to stand for aluminum oxide, is it uh-lox?