Kirk Mahoney . com

I heard the president of Morehouse College say this on C-SPAN yesterday at Tavis Smiley’s “State of the Black Union 2008″ conference in New Orleans.

Problem:
This is a mispronunciation of the correct word.

Explanation:
Although it’s true that one dictionary — Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English — contains this word, one has to realize that dictionaries not only are sources of what’s correct but also are references to incorrect forms.

For fun, I searched Google for “supremist” and “supremacist” (the correct word) and got about 84,700 and 1,280,000 matches, respectively. That tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly by a ratio of 15.1:1, which is good, but not excellent.

I believe that the use of “supremist” instead of “supremacist” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis. The incorrect word has three syllables to the correct word’s four syllables, and it is simpler to pronounce the “ist” sound than to pronounce the “acist” sound.

Solution:
“Supremacist”

I heard this on CNBC.

Problem:
“Disection” is not a word.

Explanation:
You might wonder how I could hear the misspelling of a word. The answer is that the mispronunciation is common.

Many seem to believe that “bisection” has a counterpart word that is spelled “disection” (and perhaps even that these are interchangeable). This belief is erroneous.

“Bisect” means to cut into two, where “bi” refers to two and “sect” refers to cut.

“Dissection” is the word that the CNBC journalist should have spoken.

“Dissect” means to cut apart, where “sect” (still!) refers to cut and “dis” — NOT “di”! — refers to apart.

I believe that the mispronunciation of “dissection” as “disection” (sic) comes not only from the similarity to “bisection” (and ignorance about roots of words) but also from the fact that “disection” is simpler to say than is “dissection”. This is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis about American English.

Solution:
“Dissection”