How Do You Pronounce “Etiquette”? (minicast)

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Welcome to another minicast of A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

We’ll be back with brand new episodes in the fall, but for the summer we’re catching up with some calls that we couldn’t fit onto the show last season. Aaron is a pastor from Peru, Indiana.

He wants to know how he should handle a situation in which a colleague pronounces a word incorrectly. Does he flat out just correct him? Does he do nothing? How did two people talk to each other about the right way to say something without being rude or condescending? Well, my question is this.

I am a pastor here in Peru. And when I was in school, we often talked about different saints and philosophers, the same thing that comes to mind is Augustine.

Sometimes people would pronounce his name Augustine, and some people would say it Augustine. My question isn’t so much how to pronounce that as when in conversation with someone, and let’s say I pronounce it Augustine and the person pronounces it Augustine, is it polite or is it proper to just sort of give up the way I usually say it and say it the way that they would say it, or do we carry on a subtle sub-argument about how to pronounce a word as we’re having a discussion, where they would say Augustine and I would say Augustine, and maybe we’d each say it with increasing fervor.

Nice.

And that is how it goes.

That’s exactly how people do it when they’re being polite, right?

Well, precisely, especially in an academic environment where we all have, you know, heads that are too big. You know, academic environment is exactly what I was thinking of.

I was at a conference in January, and there was a very nice young woman, a graduate student, who was presenting a paper that’s about some linguistic topic, and she pronounced the word S-T-I-M-U-L-I as stimuli the entire time. She said it maybe a dozen times, maybe two dozen. I don’t know, a lot.

And nobody in the room corrected her. Even at the Q&A part of the paper, nobody made a point of demonstrating that they had a different pronunciation, which is pretty much what you do when you don’t want to offend somebody.

But certainly it colored her entire presentation because I don’t know another person in the world who says stimuli.

Right.

That would be really distracting.

But I would do exactly what you would do, which is to just continue the sub-argument, as you put it. I think that’s the only way because once you start turning into it a meta discussion, you’re not discussing the content, but you’re discussing the delivery of the content, then you’ve gotten too far away from the point.

I mean it’s counterproductive. And you will see people take that kind of argumentative path when they don’t want to discuss the issues.

Journalists are particularly good at recognizing this in their subjects. Unfortunately, people like politicians are very good at saying, I don’t like the tone in which you asked that question. Or what do you – depends what your meaning of is is.

That’s a great example of like getting into the nitty-gritty and voiding the point.

I say just go ahead and use your pronunciation. Maybe punch the word a little bit so they get the point that you’re kind of like suggesting an alternative to them and just carry on.

Well, it really depends on what your purpose is if you want to correct the person or just be polite. I mean, in the case of grammar, for example, if somebody uses bad grammar, I’ll usually get into a standoff with them coming back with good grammar.

Right.

My explanation, I think, is to be polite. But I wondered if for the sake of language it isn’t proper sometimes to make those sub-arguments.

Well, you know, this woman who presented this paper that I saw, if I’d had this conversation with her and it was a one-on-one and she had yet to present her paper, I probably would have point blank said, you know, the usual pronunciation of that word is stimuli. Because I would want to save her the embarrassment of speaking in front of a large body of her peers and pronouncing it as stimuli.

And I think if you’re in that position, it’s like spinach in the teeth or a fly that’s unzipped. You’re helping the person.

What do you think, Aaron?

I think you’re probably right. I think it probably depends on the situation. I tend to be non-confrontational, so I think probably I would go with being polite most of the time. But in a stimuli situation, I think maybe I would speak up.

There’s kind of a third path, too, which is if they say St. Augustine and you say, oh, Augustine. I’ve usually heard that as Augustine. Then you can actually have the conversation.

A lot of times I find that the other person will say, you know, I don’t really know. I picked that up from so-and-so and let’s go check. And then it becomes a moment of discovery for you both.

That’s a good idea too.

Yeah, that sounds good. Because usually if the person you’re talking with is any kind of reasonable person, they’re going to appreciate getting into another point about your topic.

I’d imagine if you’re discussing philosophy, they’re probably all about the subtleties of the argument and probably would welcome some kind of, you know, another yet another tangent into the intricacies of the language behind St. Augustine or St. Augustine.

Hey, well, Aaron, thank you for this stimulus toward an interesting conversation.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you, Aaron.

OK. Bye bye.

Bye bye.

We’ve talked about this before, I think, but when I was learning French and a French person would give me one of those fabulous free lessons on the spot, basically pointing out how bad my French was and how much better it could be. I really, at the bottom of it, appreciated it.

Oh, yeah.

Because by the time I left Paris, my French was immensely better.

Right.

But I think a foreign language is completely different from somebody correcting you in your native tongue.

Yeah, and I always say there’s always an exception to the rule, which is never correct your father at the dinner table.

Mm, good rule.

Well, we welcome your questions about grammar, pronunciation, language, slang, dialect, localisms, word origins, you name it. If it comes out of your mouth or comes out of your pen, we’ll help you with it.

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For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett in New York City.