pronunciation

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

Carole wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/33134>:

<< "Jillous" and "jillatin" and "Milissa"? Or is "silly" "selly" in
your pronunciation? Reminds me of Potioncat and her ballpoint "pin."
<Gren. Erm, grin> I'm not trying to be sneppy, erm, snippy, just
noting that for me, a short "i" and a short "e" are distinct sounds. >>

I can tell pin from pen, grin from gren, and snip from snep. But not
silly from selly or jilly from jelly or bilious from belious. Having
thought about it, I realised this is personal rather than a dialect,
because my late mother used to get on my case about it all the time,
insisting that I pronounce some words differently except her
demonstration of how to say them sounded exactly like the way I
already said them ...

Continuing on the subject of people frustrating me: I am certain that
when I say 'thin', the TH sounds a little bit like an F and when I say
'think', the TH sounds a little bit like an S. I could say words
starting with TH all day and all the 'unvoiced' (is that right?) ones
would sound like one of those two examples. My in-person friends are
driving me mad by insisting that they can't hear any difference in my
two different THs.

Steve bboyminn wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/33143>:

<< One that I find absolutely unnerving is liberry for
library. How did anyone even come up with that? >>

It's just a missing R, so what's the big deal? R must be very slippery
because it falls out of words and sneaks into words and moves around
inside words. Modred, Moderd, Morded.

Marti wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/33148>:

<< However, GWB's "new-kew-lar" makes my skin crawl. Say it once,
OK, but don't keep making the same error over and over again,
Mr. President. A few presidents have said it that way, but it
was a slip and they didn't consistently make the same mistake.
Why make an easy-to-pronounce word difficult with such a manner
of speaking? >>

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg once said in a FRESH AIR commentary that the
pronunciation 'nucular' may have begun with people to whom it was an
unfamiliar word so it seemed a bit like 'molecular'. But, he went on
to say, nowdays 'nuclear' is not an unfamiliar word and people like
GWB pronounce it just fine when speaking of 'nuclear families'.
Nunberg suggested that [US] generals and presidents speak of 'nucular'
weapons in the spirit of "I've got them, I can use them, so I can
pronounce them any way I like."