{"id":335,"date":"2008-08-25T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2008-08-25T18:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/blog\/2008\/08\/pronunciate\/"},"modified":"2008-08-25T12:10:13","modified_gmt":"2008-08-25T18:10:13","slug":"pronunciate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/08\/pronunciate\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Pronunciate&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I occasionally hear this.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Problem:<\/strong><br \/>\n&#8220;Pronunciate&#8221; is a slang verb that makes the speaker sound dumb.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Explanation:<\/strong><br \/>\n&#8220;Pronunciate&#8221; is a back-formation of the noun &#8220;pronunciation&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe some people who use &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; know that the noun &#8220;obligation&#8221; and the verb &#8220;obligate&#8221; go together and therefore believe that &#8220;pronunciation&#8221; and &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; go together.<\/p>\n<p>I have heard &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; or one of its &#8216;conjugations&#8217; in sentences such as these:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;She did not pronunciate well.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I was repeatedly pronunciating it to the telphone operator.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;He pronunciated the words with a Californian accent.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At least in my experience, it seems as if some of those who say &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; are trying to sound more intelligent than those who are listening to them. After all, &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; is longer than &#8220;pronounce&#8221;, so the former must be a &#8220;fancier&#8221; word than the latter (or at least that&#8217;s their reasoning).<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the reason, &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; makes the speaker sound dumb.<\/p>\n<p>For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;pronounce&#8221; &#8212; 11,700,000 matches<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;pronunciate&#8221; &#8212; 817,000 matches<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This tells me that Web authors have written the <em>correct<\/em> word vs. the <em>incorrect<\/em> word by a ratio of 14.3-to-1, which is not good, especially given nearly a million matches for the incorrect word.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Solution:<\/strong><br \/>\n&#8220;Pronounce&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I occasionally hear this. Problem: &#8220;Pronunciate&#8221; is a slang verb that makes the speaker sound dumb. Explanation: &#8220;Pronunciate&#8221; is a back-formation of the noun &#8220;pronunciation&#8221;. Maybe some people who use &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; know that the noun &#8220;obligation&#8221; and the verb &#8220;obligate&#8221; go together and therefore believe that &#8220;pronunciation&#8221; and &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; go together. I have heard &#8220;pronunciate&#8221;&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-verbs"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>&quot;Pronunciate&quot; - Kirk Mahoney . com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kirkmahoney.com\/wordpress\/blog\/2008\/08\/pronunciate\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"&quot;Pronunciate&quot; - Kirk Mahoney . com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I occasionally hear this. Problem: &#8220;Pronunciate&#8221; is a slang verb that makes the speaker sound dumb. Explanation: &#8220;Pronunciate&#8221; is a back-formation of the noun &#8220;pronunciation&#8221;. Maybe some people who use &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; know that the noun &#8220;obligation&#8221; and the verb &#8220;obligate&#8221; go together and therefore believe that &#8220;pronunciation&#8221; and &#8220;pronunciate&#8221; go together. 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