`Do different pronunciations fit with basic grammar?`

By Wally Wachter
Retired Herald Managing Editor

HURRICANES HAVE BEEN CHURNING all week in the Caribbean. To hear news announcers report on their progress makes you wonder whether they are talking about the same location.

Most call it the Carib'yan. There may be some who still refer to it as the Car-ib-ee'-an.

When we studied geography and English even back in grade school, our teachers referred to it and we accepted it as Car-ib-bee-an. Even the radio announcers in those days called it that.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt changed that during one of his fireside chats in the early 1930s. He called it Carib'yan. From that day on, radio and TV announcers, speechmakers and others have adopted FDR's pronunciation as the proper one.

Modern dictionaries have allowed us to keep faith with our teachers of the past. At one time, they listed only the original pronunciation. Newer versions of Funk and Wagnalls and Webster's have both pronunciations, but list the older one first. Common usage probably makes it right.

The influence that pronunciations, new phrases and expressions that the nation's leaders have added to our language would make lexographers and our old English and journalism teachers cringe.

There are rhetorical gems like former President Bush's campaign expressions like ``read my lips,'' ``a thousand points of light'' and ``a kinder and gentler nation'' that can't stand close scrutiny for substance. Yet, they have found their way into the scripts of news commentators, speechmakers, television and even into the routines of stand-up comedians.

They have become so overworked that they have reached the ``trite'' file that journalists are encouraged to avoid.

Back in the days when our English teachers drummed into us the importance of proper grammar, we dared not deviate from the rules. For instance, the comparison of ``gentle,'' we were taught, was ``more gentle, most gentle,'' and not ``gentler and gentlest.''

But Presidents Roosevelt and Bush were not the first to throw us curves. Practically every president since George Washington has come up with pet expressions that speakers and writers adopted as vogue in their vocabularies.

The ugly days of the Watergate investigation in the early 1970s brought another prize phrase to the American version of the English language. A testifying lawyer used ``at this point in time'' as an adverb to denote the present. He could have just said ``now.'' But the new phrase was picked up quickly by newsmen, political speechwriters and public speakers. For a long time it was one of the overworked phrases in the language. Today it still finds its way into legalese jargon.

During the same investigation, a witness, trying to make his position clearly understood, ended each statement with a question, ``OK?'' Most every speaker from then on copied the tactic. It added boring monotony to seminars, after-dinner speeches, sales pitches and demonstrations.

More recently, during a congressional hearing for a Supreme Court nominee, charges of sexual harassment were brought against him by a former woman associate. It stirred a difference among news commentators about whether it was ``har'as'' or ``har-as'.'' Some newscasters used both of the pronunciations in the same news items. Dictionaries, to be on the safe side, list both, but the preferred is ``har-as','' just as we learned in school.

And so, as time goes by, we will continually be tempted by new words and phrases that our national leaders' speechwriters will use in striving for a more colorful language.

Before we adopt them for our repetitive, everyday use, let's analyze them to determine how they fit with the sound, basic rules of grammar we learned in English classes so many years ago.

Wally Wachter is retired managing editor of The Herald

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