Although a few sticklers cling to the traditional pronunciation of short-lived with a long i, the vast majority of Americans now pronounce short-lived with a short i. Long live the latter, we say. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Short-Lived Pronunciation”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello.
Hi, who’s this?
This is Nikki Leary. I’m calling from Live Oak in Swanee County, Florida.
Well, welcome to the show, Nikki. What can we do for you?
Recently, I heard somebody say short-lived.
What is the difference between short-lived and short-lived?
Oh, interesting.
I think they both last for the same period of time.
Did it strike you as wrong or preferable?
Which one sounds correct to your ear?
Short-lived.
Short-lived, yeah.
What about you, Martha?
Did you say short-lived?
You know, I tried to train myself to say short-lived because I said short-lived most of my life until I read some linguistic authorities who said that actually it comes from short life rather than live.
But there’s almost nobody except the utmost peevers in the English-speaking world who say short-lived.
Yeah.
Well, it strikes me as being just strange.
Mm—
Yeah, I think it’s the traditional pronunciation, but I almost never hear it.
Yeah, no.
It’s something like 98% of the country says short-lived all the time, anytime they say it.
The other 2%, most of them are battling, like Martha described, to try to say it one way, when all of their experience and instinct tells them to say it the other way.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I guess we could say that short-lived is short-lived.
How about that?
Okay.
Because at the bottom of this, what we have, Nikki, is this etymological fallacy that the origin of an expression somehow still has to control its pronunciation, and it’s simply not true for English.
We have made short-lived conform to what we know about these past forms of a verb.
And it is very consistent with all the other pronunciations of the verb live, to live.
So it just really follows standard orthographic principles, I mean standard morphological principles in English.
Language is so fascinating, isn’t it?
It is, isn’t it now?
And what would we do without it?
That’s very true.
We have an hour of silence on the radio each week.
Thanks, Nikki. Call us again, all right?
Thank you.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
If you’ve got a question about something that you heard that didn’t sound right or sounded great, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.
