Large Vocabulary: Threat, or Menace?

[xela]

Every geek has had the experience of saying a word aloud that they learned from reading &mdash and discovering that they pronounce it wrong. It's rather a rite of passage for young adult geeks¹. It's been a few years since I experienced this phenomenon from the speaker's side. But yesterday I found myself using the word "fecund" in a sentence — and just as the F sound started passing my lips, realized I did not know how to pronounce it. Which isn't to say I didn't have a pronunciation all loaded up and ready to emerge from my lips. But I had no idea whether it was, in fact, the normal pronunciation². This tangential thought caused me to screw up the bit of mental arithmetic necessary for the rest of the sentence, such that I said "August" when I meant "May".

(Perhaps the threat lies not in a large vocabulary, but in the meta-state of observing yourself stumbling over your own vocabulary and thereby menacing your arithmetic skills.)

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¹  I do wonder, with the advent of computer dictionaries that will pronounce a word for you at the click of a mouse, whether we may be the last generation of nerds to share this common experience. It is both vastly quicker to look up a word online than in a paper dictionary, and much less work to click your mouse than to figure out your dictionary's pronunciation key. I'm sure if I were a kid today I would use an online dictionary far more than I in fact used paper ones when I was little. (I was always very fond of dictionaries, but it was nevertheless rare that I wouldn't try to puzzle out a new word from context first, and only turn to a dictionary if I couldn't. Or — rarely — when eiher zero or two obvious pronunciations occurred to me.) This is, of course, not an unmixed blessing: We may also be the last generation discover the pleasure of browsing the dictionary.
²  According to thefreedictionary.com I in fact mangled it rather badly.

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Apparently it is correct to say it either FEE-cund or FEH-cund.

I've always heard it as FEH-cund. I dunno how you "mangled" it.

[ken_r]

I don't know that I've ever actually heard it spoken, and I'm quite sure I've never used it. I assumed the accent was on the second syllable.

I wonder what impact online audio chat, voip, talking dictionaries, audio interfaces, etc., will have on regional pronunciation and accents in the next 20 or 40 years.

[siderea]

I assumed the accent was on the second syllable.

Yeah, me too.

[tla]

I was going to say; while I liked dictionaries in the abstract, I was generally far too lazy to actually use them to look up most words. I absorbed their meanings from context. And I am just as lazy about looking up words in the era of online dictionaries. So I am confident that mispronouncing words will be a geek rite of passage for years to come.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I've been (almost literally) in a cave for a week; hence the late reply.

I'm actually a lot more likely to look up words online than I ever was in the era of paper dictionaries. I wonder which, if either, of us is more typical. At any rate, in another ten years we won't have to guess.

[jered]

A far greater threat than dictionary words are names. I frequently read "The Economist" to Brian on road trips, and I stumble terribly over names... only rarely do they provide pronunciation keys, and usually only when they are wittily pointing out that dubya is going to have a heckuva time prnouncing Angela Merkel with a hard "g".

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

I've been under a rock for a week, so this is a late reply.

It's sort of a different category. Names in the news tend to be fairly short-lived, so you're unlikely to have developed a mental pronunciation and then find it to be wrong years later. And for me at least, NPR is my primary source of news, so I tend to have the opposite problem: I know how to pronounce lots of world leaders' names that I'm not sure I'd recognize in print.

[kareila]

I'm very guilty of this phenomenon, but in this particular case, my instinct to accent it similarly to "fecal" doesn't appear to be too far off the mark.

And yes, you meant May. Thbbt.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Late reply; I've been under a rock. I deliberately shied away from pronouncing it similarly to "fecal" because my instinct (or is it hope?) is that they don't have the same root.

And thbbt! yourself. You ever going to tell people?

[kareila]

Eventually.

[alierak.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, with my split-brained supervision of an irritable child at the time, I have no idea how you actually pronounced it, but I may have thought you said "heck of a".

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

Fecund is such an excellent word... like gravid too.
I love all words and wish I could remember to work more fancy ones into everyday conversation, when you do remember an exceptional word it's like the verbal equivallent of scoring a goal.
facetious. Score!
prevaricate. Score!
melange Hatrick!

Arf, I spotted your use of chuffed the other day, it never occured to me that this word could be considered unusual or incomprehensible since it's a very common term in the UK, but you're not the first person (from the US) to ask me what it meant. I had no idea I could be confusing folk with everyday Brit parlence. Splendid! :-)

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

There is a certain joy to pulling out the obscure vocabulary. Though I've also learned to treasure simplicity of expression. (Boy, was that a case of word not matching the deed.)

I find your writing delightful, and it's not just the Englishness of your English. But you hit on a minor point of pride here: I didn't ask you what chuffed meant: I saw you use it, dug around the web a little to figure out what it meant, and commented to you about what a delicious word it is. Especially in the MIT community, though I expect in most other nerd communities too, there's a fair bit of peer pressure against asking questions you could readily answer for yourself. Partly it's about respecting other people's time: I spent at most a minute looking it up, and you didn't spend any time telling me what it meant — hence you had that minute to do other, more interesting things. Or maybe just to waste reading this comment....