Metathesis

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John in New Hampshire.

Hi, John.

Hi, John. How are you doing?

Well, I have a question that maybe you can clear up for me, something that’s been bugging me for a long time.

Oh, we love those.

There seems to be two ways to pronounce the word jewelry, and the other way, of course, rhymes with foolery.

The first half of my life, I said jewelry, and then when I was looking closely at the word and the way that it’s spelled, it seemed obvious to me that the correct way would be jewelry.

So I changed the way that I say it, but I seem to be in the minority.

The way I hear it on the radio and whether it’s NPR or commercial radio.

Yeah.

So I’m very confused and I wondered if you can clear this up for me.

Yeah, I think we can help you with that a little bit.

What you’re talking about is what linguists call metathesis, which is the transposition of internal sounds or letters.

And it’s interesting because L’s and R’s tend to be particular culprits for people.

So you get not only jewelry, but you get realtor instead of realtor.

You get foliage instead of foliage.

There’s the L.

And it happens a lot with R’s, too.

You know, some people say Sutheran or Larynx instead of Larynx.

Do you find that it’s a pet peeve for you?

Does it bother you when you hear people say it?

Well, maybe.

Yes.

Yeah, I used to feel this little sense of sort of, I don’t know, superiority because I knew that it was jewelry rather than jewelry.

But then I started noticing how many times I transpose letters.

Like I say introduce instead of introduce and temperature instead of temperature.

So you’re right that people pronounce it a couple of different ways.

Well, I started to feel that I was in the minority, so maybe they were right.

Yeah, well, I would say that the preferred pronunciation is jewelry, as you say.

But, Grant, you will find it in other dictionaries, right?

Yeah, you will find it.

The non-standard pronunciation is so common that, of course, the dictionary editors have started to record it.

Sometimes they make a comment on its standardness or lack of standardness.

Sometimes they just include it silently and just accept it as another pronunciation.

I think what’s throwing people, too, is that the J-E-W-E-L looks like it should be two syllables every time.

And, of course, there are two standard pronunciations for the word and one non-standard one.

And so there’s plenty of room for getting the wrong one out of your mouth.

So that jewel could rhyme with tool.

It could.

Jewelry.

Yeah, it could, yeah.

And, of course, there’s also the dialectical variants around the country and so on and so forth.

Thank you so much, John, for raising this question.

Hopefully some people will decide one way or the other how they prefer to pronounce it, and we’ll have more people agreeing with you, all right?

Well, all right.

Thanks very much for your answer.

Sure.

Thanks for calling me.

Thanks for calling.

Good luck.

Bye-bye.

Well, I hope he’s comfortable.

And I just noticed that that’s another one, right?

Comfortable.

Comfortable.

Comfortable.

I say comfortable.

I say, it took me forever not to say relator.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah, because I learned it as a kid from just hearing the word.

You know, my parents would go house hunting or something or sell our house, and that word would come up constantly.

And I just repeated what I heard from all of the people, including the realtors themselves.

And they said realtor or relator?

They’re relator.

Relator.

Relator.

Is that an Ozark thing, you think?

No, it’s a…

Relator.

It’s from Missouri anyway.

Interesting.

They’re tricky little letters, aren’t they?

Call us with your pronunciation bugaboos.

1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.