Do Elephants Jump?

by David Feldman

  But this theory seems lame to us. Although “jimmy” has many slang connotations in American English, from a crowbar to an engine made by General Motors, none of them refer specifically to blacks. We subscribe to a much simpler explanation. In most, although admittedly not all, places where sprinkles are called “jimmies,” the reference is only to chocolate candies. Since their color resembles the complexion of many African Americans, it’s easy to see how jimmies might have picked up the racist connotations, even if the inventor of jimmies intended only to honor his Irish American employee.

  Submitted by Kendra Delisio of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Thanks also to Rick Kot of New York, New York; and Netanel Ganin of Sharon, Massachusetts.

  Why Do We Draw a Bead on a Target?

  It doesn’t sound too intimidating to sketch a little picture of a bauble on a target, but that isn’t the “bead” in question. The bead referred to in this phrase, coined in the mid-nineteenth century, is the foresight of a rifle, which, come to think of it, looks like a tiny bead.

  Submitted by James Gleick of Garrison, New York.

  Why Do Many Dictionaries Say That the Days of the Week Are Pronounced “Fri-DEE,” “Sun-DEE,” etc.?

  In May of 1992, we received this plea from reader Richard Jackoway, of Shell Beach, California:

  I realize this does not sound like a tough question, but go to almost any dictionary and I’ll bet it says the way you have said the days of the week all of your life is wrong.

  I have before me the American Heritage College Edition (picked simply because it was the closest), and if I look up Monday it says, “Monday (mun’de, ‘da). I have been doing this for years and almost every dictionary shows Monday (or any other day of the week) with this unusual preferred pronunciation for the “day” syllable.

  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never known anyone to pronounce the days of the week like this. Are all of my friends and acquaintances out of step or is this some obscure practical joke by lexicographers?

  As noted, there are a few dictionaries that have the “normal” pronunciation first, but their numbers are few. Can you solve this linguistic Imponderable?

  In 1992, we were dumbfounded, assuming that the premise of this question must be wrong. We consulted the two dictionaries closest to us, and sure enough, both our Merriam-Webster and Webster’s New World Dictionary listed “de” before “da.” Always eager to help the desperate, we did look into this Imponderable, and reached the estimable Brian Sietsema, who was then the pronunciation editor of Merriam-Webster dictionaries. Sietsema, who had the good humor of one who has heard similar rantings from enraged readers, held his ground. “Most people actually do say “de,” he insisted, much to our amazement.

  “How do you decide what pronunciations you list?” we asked, wondering what role liquor or hallucinogens played in the mix. Sietsema proceeded to indicate that orthoepy (the study of pronunciation) is far from a hard science. Until the 1930s, a pronunciation editor’s job was to act as judge and jury of how words should be pronounced; but with the advent of radio as a mass medium, Merriam-Webster decided that its role should be to describe how people are really speaking, rather than how an editor, or speech professors thought they should — Sietsema proudly followed in this new practice.

  Part of Brian’s day consisted of listening to the radio, watching television, and writing down phonetic citations as they arose, keeping a running file of variants. Sietsema emphasized that today’s mispronunciation could be tomorrow’s correct pronunciation, and he gave some examples. Decades ago, the word iron was pronounced “I-ron” instead of “I-ern.” The toothpaste additive “FLU-er-ide” morphed into “FLOOR-ide.” And in a variant listed in Merriam - Webster that caused a firestorm, “NU-kyuh-ler” was listed as an alternative pronunciation, even if it wasn’t deemed as an “acceptable” one.

  Somehow, we got sidetracked and tackled more pressing Imponderables, like “Why Did Pirates Wear Earrings?” and never finished our research. Now, more than ten years later, we posed our Imponderable to Constance Baboukis, managing editor of the U.S. Dictionaries Program of the Oxford University Press, and she replied:

  This is an easy question and no mystery at all. The -DEE pronunciation for the days of the week (but not other -day words like holiday) used to be the only pronunciation, and is probably still used by more people in the U.S. than the -DAA pronunciation.

  Agggh! We went to the Merriam-Webster Web site and listened to the disembodied voice pronounce “Fri’DEE,” (www.m-w.com/cgibin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=friday) and what came back sounded like nothing we’ve ever heard.

  But dictionary editors ain’t no dummies. We figured there must be more to this issue. So we gathered an all-star team of “pronsters” (the favorite nickname for orthoepists), all of whom have advised on or edited many dictionaries:

  Constance Baboukis, (CB) of Oxford University Press

  Bill Kretzschmar, (BK) professor of English and linguistics at the University of Georgia and editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English

  Rima McKinzey, (RM) freelance orthoepist, co-editor of the mammoth Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names

  Enid Pearsons, (EP) a lexicographer with a specialty in pronunciation and former senior editor in charge of pronunciation for Random House dictionaries.

  Of course, we found that these orthoepists were the opposite of dummies, and as editors were faced with constraints so daunting that we could almost forgive them for “Mon-DEE.” Dictionary editors, for the most part, gather pronunciation data just as Sietsema did — by the seat of their pants:

  RM: Those of us in the field just try to listen a lot.

  BK: Most dictionary pronunciation editors just rely on their own experience, and this is not too reliable. I have seen some editors ask for comments on e-mail lists, and so some of them are getting anecdotal reports from people who write back to the list.

  One fear is that because most U.S. dictionaries are based on the East Coast, and editorial staffs tend to be populated by well-educated Easterners, this “bias” might slip into the pronunciation guides. Kretzschmar is the director of the American Linguistic Atlas Project, which has been gathering data on how “real people” speak in different regions of the country for nearly seventy-five years.

  Pronunciation editors don’t have tin ears. Their excellent ears, ironically, are part of the reasons why we see “DEE” as an acceptable pronunciation. All of the dictionaries we consulted list “da” as the proper pronunciation for “day,” but:

  RM: Just because an entry consists of one or more free forms (i.e., “day,” in the names of the days of the week) it doesn’t necessarily follow that they will be pronounced as they are when they’re alone. Cupboard is not pronounced “KUP-board,” for instance.

  BK: In “Monday,” it’s a matter of stress: primary stress is on the first syllable; the second syllable can either have secondary stress, in which case it still has the -da pronunciation, or it can be relatively unstressed, in which case the vowel quality changes to something like -de. Think of words like tomato or potato, where the last syllable sounds like O if stressed, or changes to something like UH if not.

  EP: The final syllable in all seven days of the week lacks stress, and earlier American dictionaries recorded something like “MUN-dih, T(Y)ooz-dih,” etc. to indicate that. That was back in the days when American dictionaries showed “HAP-ih” and “PRIT-ih” for happy and pretty as well. I remember changing that “ih” sound in the Random House dictionaries in the 1960s, on the theory that it more closely reflected a British pronunciation than an American one.

  In short, there are way too many variants for any dictionary, even the unabridged ones, to deal with such nuances in the tiny amount of space (usually less than one line) in which pronunciation is relegated. Just consider all the other questions that pronunciation editors have to take into account:

  1. How Can Regional Differences Be Accounted For?

  Although Babo
ukis contends that a plurality of Americans say “DEE,” she notes that this isn’t true in the East, “so it sounds strange to our ears.” Likewise, Pearsons professed to have heard “DEE” spoken “innumerable times,” but it is clearly more common in the Midwest (think of the protagonist of the movie Fargo), and “perhaps among older speakers.”

  The Northeast may make fun of southern or midwestern patterns of speech, but as McKinzey puts it: “Proper Bostonian speech is no more correct than proper Atlantan speech.” England had a tradition of “received pronunciation,” the style of the upper class learned in public schools (the equivalent of American private prep schools) and promoted at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. We have no such tradition, and there is little reason for dictionaries to exclude variants because they are the choices of a particular region.

  2. How Can Dictionary Readers Decipher Pronunciation Guides When There Are No Standard Recognized Symbols?

  RM: American dictionaries are all self-pronouncing. That is, however you pronounce the symbol the dictionary may be using to show the pronunciation of the a in cat, that is how you’ll pronounce those entries. This is inherently different from most dictionaries around the world, which use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA has one sound to one symbol. This works for most languages around the world, but not American English, for multiple reasons. We’re not taught it in school, for one thing.”

  McKinzey points to a horrendous problem for pronunciation editors. Even educated American readers are likely to know the symbol for a short and long vowel, and little else about pronunciation symbols. Every dictionary’s scheme is different, and we daresay the average dictionary user never consults the pronunciation guide at the beginning of the dictionary to sort out the problem.

  Kretzschmar is a proponent of IPA, and works with it in the Oxford English Dictionary and his Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English:

  BK: While OED and ODPCE render pronunciations phonetically, American dictionaries usually render them phonemically…. Americans usually pronounce latter and ladder the same, which OED and ODPCE represent, but most American dictionaries represent one with a t and one with a d….

  We chose IPA for our ODPCE because it is clearly the best for the world market. Tradition is really the only reason for American dictionaries to retain their (exotic and inconsistent) symbol sets — the marketing departments of dictionary houses are afraid that people won’t buy their dictionaries if they are the first to switch to IPA.

  Of course, even if IPA is more accurate and consistent, marketing departments (and editors) have a reason to fear readers recoiling from the prospect of having to learn a new set of “strange symbols,” only some of which look like English letters.

  3. Should Dictionary Entries Be Descriptive or Prescriptive?

  Is the purpose of a dictionary to record how a user should pronounce a word, or to record how ordinary people do pronounce a word?

  RM: Most dictionaries do try to be descriptive, both in definition and pronunciation.

  BK: Dictionaries should be witnesses, not judge or even jury (pace American Heritage Dictionary). Pronunciation is much more variable than we give it credit for. There are different habits of pronunciation that occur to varying degrees within regional and social groups of people in America, and even particular individuals vary their pronunciation from use to use of the same word. Of course, this means that there is always a choice of what to include — some judgment has to be involved because no dictionary has room for so many variants.

  Kretzschmar sees his role not unlike a cultural anthropologist — to record what exists in the real world. The American Heritage Dictionary is more prescriptive — and has amassed a “usage panel” with luminaries from Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia to writer Susan Sontag to weigh in along with lexicographers on their opinions. Most dictionaries fall somewhere in between the Merriam-Webster dictionaries, which tend to be the most descriptive, and the AHD. Enid Pearson’s position strikes a balance that appeals to us:

  EP: As for prescriptivism vs. descriptivism, each dictionary has its own philosophy, and even that may not be internally consistent when it comes to language change in pronunciation, grammar, and usage. Mine is essentially descriptive (the language does evolve), but with the strong caveat that — as a lexicographer — when you’re describing, you owe it to your dictionary users to make clear what attitudes still exist in the real world, what the older “standards” are among educated speakers, and what negative responses the users may encounter if, for example, they persist in saying “NOO-kyuh-ler,” or they say, “Give it to Mary and I,” or they spell memento with an initial “mo-.”

  I guess that makes me a cranky prescriptive descriptivist.

  Kind of like a God-fearing atheist!

  4. If Variant Pronunciations Are Listed, What Order Should They Be In?

  Many readers assume that the definitions in a dictionary are placed in order of their frequency of use. But the first pronunciation listed in a dictionary is not necessarily the “correct” one:

  RM: [Most dictionaries] try to place what the pronunciation editor considers the most common variant first, followed by less common or more regional variants. Many times, variants are equally common. However, a dictionary is a two-dimensional medium and one pronunciation cannot be placed on top of another and still have the entry readable and usable. Beyond that, editorial decisions are what makes “Eether” come before or after “EYEther.”

  BK: Order of pronunciation entries has different significance in different dictionaries. In the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English, we say explicitly that order of presentation should not be taken as indicating preference or frequency of the pronunciations offered…. But people often do interpret the order of pronunciations that way. You really have to consult the frontmatter of each dictionary in order to determine what, if anything, is implied by the order in that dictionary.

  5. When Pronunciations Are in Flux, When Should Dictionaries Change Their Entries?

  RM: Pronunciations change quite slowly and dictionaries are fairly conservative in their approach.

  Sometimes, as is lately the case, a growing pronunciation shift is essentially ignored for the clarity of other pronunciation distinctions. The growing merging of the pronunciation of cot and caught or Don and Dawn will no doubt be ignored in American dictionaries because (1) where on the vowel spectrum they merge is still shifting and (2) whatever symbol is chosen will have a greater impact on other words not yet merged.

  This is precisely what BK alluded to when he said that most American dictionaries render pronunciation phonemically, so that distinctions are not made between similar sounds, even if native speakers could distinguish them if pressed. Phonetic transcriptions attempt to describe every single sound made in a language — certainly not possible with the limited number of symbols with which dictionary editors must work.

  But even if dictionaries are slow to amend, eventually they do, which is one reason we’re not unhappy that it has taken us twelve years to finally answer this Imponderable. For while twelve years ago, it was possible to find dictionaries that listed only “Sun-DEE,” or “Fri-DEE” before “Fri-Day,” the times they are a-changin’.

  CB: Current dictionaries show both, sometimes with the DAA pronunciation first because it is gaining ground.

  Keep in mind that all dictionaries with new covers do not necessarily contain new content. Those bargain ones on the bookstore tables are often out-of-print oldies that were bought up cheap and refurbished, but not rewritten. If you use recent editions of American dictionaries written by active staffs who do research, such as Oxford, Merriam, New World, and American Heritage, you will get current pronunciations.

  EP: Happily, most current American desk dictionaries show both pronunciations now — some with -DEE first, some with -DAA first, some with -DAA only. The -DAA pronunciation is, I suspect, taking over. Perhaps it is time your reader bought a new dictionary.
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br />   We recently contacted that reader, Richard Jackoway, and found out that he is a wordsmith himself — city editor of the San Luis Obispo Tribune. After being apprised of the Reader’s Digest version of the explanation above, Jackoway reiterated his plaintive wail: Do the editors really think anywhere near as many people say “Mon-DEE” as “Mon-DAA”? Are they really suggesting that people pronounce the word “Mon-DEE”?

  We looked at all the current major dictionaries and found that, as all of our orthoepists suggested, you absolutely must look at the pronunciation guides in the front of each dictionary to learn how each word should be pronounced. And if you want to know the significance of the order in which variants are listed.

  We have paraphrased each dictionary’s policy and rendered the pronunciation in our own scheme:

  American Heritage Dictionary (does not indicate which variants are preferred or popular, merely that variants are included “whenever necessary”): “Fri-DEE, Fri-DAA”

  Merriam-Webster Dictionary (no preference for variant order): “Fri-DEE, Fri-DAA”

  Oxford American Dictionary (preferred pronunciation is listed first): “Fri-DAA”

  American Century Dictionary (unless there is an explanation, either variant is acceptable): “Fri-DAA, Fri-DEE”