Comment by craftkiller
6 days ago
I once worked for a CEO that pronounced "year" as "yeah". I loved it. Every meeting felt like a pep rally because it was sprinkled with phrases like "we've got four yeahs" and "we worked all yeah on this".
6 days ago
I once worked for a CEO that pronounced "year" as "yeah". I loved it. Every meeting felt like a pep rally because it was sprinkled with phrases like "we've got four yeahs" and "we worked all yeah on this".
A LOT of people in the nuclear industry pronounce it as 'nucular'. I'm a little horrified.
You can read all about it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular
But it's not something to be horrified by; it's no different from how we commonly pronounce "February" without the first "r", or "government" without the "n", or "Wednesday" flipping the "dne" to "nd".
What's even more interesting is that it's only in the context of weapons/energy. The same person will say "nuclear family" the way it's spelled.
But in the weapons/energy context, it's just a natural re-use of the suffix in "moleCULAR", "oCULAR", "cirCULAR". Technically wrong in terms of its derivation, but it feels entirely natural to say, and requires less tongue movement.
It's not due to a lack of education or anything. It's more like a regional dialect, where the region is nuclear weapons and energy.
Do you pronounce it as Wed-nes-day?
I've never heard it as anything but Wends-day, but maybe everyone else is wrong.
2 replies →
This may be wrong or apocryphal or a third thing:
But I recall reading that this is a deliberate affect used by those who work with nuclear material. Partly as a shibboleth, partly as a means of making the word easier to say quickly.
It came up because George W Bush would pronounce it “nucular” and that was given as the reason. All if my memory serves that is.
It would make sense as a different spelling and pronunciation I guess. Like "molecular" or "ocular" or "particular". Fits in better.
Simpson fans, surely, for obvious reasons.
I’d bet that they love the foilage in fall, too.
Someone has to say cromulent at this point
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Northeast USA, maybe NY or NJ?
I think he was Australian but we were in silicon valley at the time (though I live+work in that area now).
Yeah I can picture it. The non-rhotic R on its own doesn’t narrow it further, but there would be distinction within Australia based on the sounds of the “ea” part.
Off the cuff I can picture some Australians taking it more nasally at the top of the palate sort of yee-ah (think Steve Irwin), a more neutral yeehr with a hint of final r (but more clipped and mono syllable than an American accent), or even a yair that might push as far as yuhhh (heading towards a sort of hybrid of Californian Valley Girl and the posh British accent used in American media).
Bit of an exploration of the evoking Australian accent here: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/103321146
Australians have other speech things too like shortening words and ending them with a long E sound. breakfast => breaky(or however they spell it down under). or adding an "oh" syllable to words like right-o
All dose poiple, all dose hamboigahs.
Boston?
Quote possibly, I'm guessing a resident of Boston for many yeahs