124. How do you pronounce “irritated” please?

I turned on the television in the early afternoon at the beginning of May to watch coverage of the County Championship cricket match between Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.

When the picture appeared, I was confronted by the face of Matt Allwright.  He is someone whose reports on the television programme “Watchdog” I have found interesting and so I stayed with that channel.  He was hosting a quiz programme called “The Code”.

I managed to watch 25 minutes of it before I either fell asleep or switched to the cricket.  I can’t remember which.  “The Code” is the dullest, most boring and contrived quiz show that has ever polluted afternoon television viewing. 

The highpoint of the programme seemed to be to watch electronic digits 1 to 9 flicker in a small square box and see whether, when the flickering stops, the number that appears is the number that had been chosen by the contestant.  It really is as thrilling as that and it happens every 5 or 6 minutes. 

I used to get more excitement at the playground by anticipating where a roundabout carrying my children would stop and then standing at that place to see if I was right.

“What kind of nut is in the nut in a Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate bar?” was one question.  The answer is almond.

How do you pronounce “almond”?

The days when a linguist might be able to tell someone’s birthplace from the way they pronounced a particular word have gone.  A recent University of Cambridge study has found that more and more people are using and pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the southeast do. The cause is unclear, but is probably the result of greater mobility and the influence of broadcast media.

I heard “almond” pronounced in three ways by three people in three minutes. 

Matt Allwright:         “AL-mond”

Contestant:                “AR-mond”

Woman at a desk:    “AWL-mond”

Does it matter?  Yes, it bloody well does matter!  I feel the same irritation when someone says, “AL-mond” as I do with those who have tea and “sconns”.  They are “scones” as far as I’m concerned.  I know that a lot of people disagree with me on that and will challenge me by asking how I pronounce “gone” or "shone".  Fair enough, but I will counter with “bone” and "stone".

English pronunciation is tricky, what with “bough”, “through”, “cough” and “rough” but some pronunciations are just plain wrong and AL-mond is one of those.  I wonder how Allwright pronounces “alms”, the money or food given to poor people?

I suspect that everyone of us pronounces words the way that our parents did.  I can remember being jeered by other pupils on my first day at junior school in Suffolk when I answered a question by saying, “drama”.  

I had just moved to live in Lowestoft from south London and I used a long vowel sound in the first syllable – “drarmer”.   I was laughed at by everyone, including the teacher.   “Oh, it’s drARmer is it?” he sneered.  Bloody Mr Sandford! 

I came across an article that begins with the words:

There’s nothing more irritating to a pedant’s ear than someone saying, “mis-chiev-ious” instead of “mis-chif-erse”.  OK, I’m a pedant - in that person’s view - because I do become irritated but I am unapologetic.  

Every one of the four dictionaries I have looked at says that phonetically, the word “arm” is pronounced ɑːm; “almond” is pronounced ɑːmənd and “alms” is pronounced ɑːmz.  And so, the contestant pronounced it correctly because the first syllable of "almond" is pronounced like "arm".  That’s not difficult is it?

There are other words that I seem to be hearing mispronounced more often.  When she was Secretary of State for Transport, Justine Greening often had to talk about the proposed HS2 rail line.  In an interview in October 2011, soon after she had been appointed, she pronounced the ‘H’ as “haitch”. 

I think that someone must have spoken to her because she always spoke about “High Speed Two” after that.  Never again while she held that office did she ever say, “(h)aitch ess two”.

The word that is the sixth most often mispronounced by UK residents, apparently, is the word “often” itself.  The ‘t’ should be silent but many people say, “off-ten” instead of “offen”.  Similarly, I find it jarring when the ‘t’ in ‘hospital’ is accentuated.  The pronunciation is “hospidtle”.

For five years, Caroline and I lived on Grand Cayman, an island that to all intents and purposes is a suburb of Miami and some American pronunciations, such as leaving the ‘h’ off the word ‘herb’ really niggled me. 

When we were living in Cayman, we found that all indigenous Caymanians, including pastors, teachers and cabinet ministers, always “arks” for something and never did they ‘ask’.  

We got used to hearing the American way of pronouncing words.  I sometimes asked for tomato juice with Worcester sauce even when I didn’t really want one, just so that I could snigger when I heard the bartender say, “ter-may-dow juice and wuss-sess-ter-shy-yer sauce”.

Caroline once had a problem in the University of Miami Hospital Cafeteria.  It was lunchtime; the café was crowded and she was in a long, slow moving queue.

“Could I have a bottle of water please?” she asked.

“Huh?” said the assistant. “Say wah?”

“A bottle of water please.”

“What’s that, honey?”

“A bottle of water.”

“Is that some kind of juice?”

“No, water.”

“Huh?  There’s a line, honey.  Say again.”  

“Water!”

“Honey, we’re kinda busy.  What d’yer want?”

Caroline, remembering that around 70% of Miami is of Hispanic origin, asked for a bottle of “agua”.

“Agua!  Right, okay!  A boddle of wodder.  Why didn’t you say?”

The assistant had finally understood what this strange woman with her funny accent was wanting.  After that, we both learnt to always change the ‘t’ into a ‘d’ whenever we wanted water and to ask for “budder” to spread on our bread.

When Americans say “privacy” they pronounce it with a long vowel so that it becomes, “preyevacy”.  That’s fair enough I suppose but why do they shorten the vowel in “leverage” and pronounce it, ‘levverage’?  And why have so many news reporters here in the UK recently begun to copy them?  That really peeves me. 

“Leverage” is a word that I only ever hear in news reports.  I don’t think I’ve ever used it in conversation and no one I’ve ever talked to has used it either.  I do wish that reporters in the UK said, ‘leeverage’.

When saying “primarily” there is an increasing number of people who stress the second syllable, not the first.  That’s another American influence.

Americans are inconsistent in their pronunciation too.  Caroline’s sister lives on Sullivan Street, close to Houston Street in New York.  The street is pronounced “How-ston”.  The city of the same spelling in Texas is pronounced, “Hoo-ston”.

How words are pronounced doesn’t really matter at all as long as the meaning of what is said is clear.  Pronunciation is like grammar in that even if a ‘rule’ is broken, no damage is done if the listener understands what is meant. 

However, like poor grammar, nonstandard pronunciation can cause irritation and to me it certainly does.