Incorrect pronunciations you have (or have had) to unlearn

[Salmoneus]

Do you also say "paper cutter thing" for what we call 'scissors'?

So what do y'all call a "letter opener"? An éviscéreuse?

Well I do now!

Not really comparable, though - one's losing a well-established, international word for something that has one, the other's not inventing a word for something. Also, a letter knife is only found in museums and may well have a better name among historians and enthusiasts, I don't know, whereas a guillotine is a daily object so it seems weirder for people to not know the word for it...

[Vijay]

Seriously? How often do you need to cut paper? The last time I even saw a paper cutter (or gui/l/otine, if you prefer ) must have been in art class when I was a teenager, or something like that. (Well, okay, maybe it depends on what your job is or something).

[Zaarin]

Do you also say "paper cutter thing" for what we call 'scissors'?

So what do y'all call a "letter opener"? An éviscéreuse?

Well I do now!

Not really comparable, though - one's losing a well-established, international word for something that has one, the other's not inventing a word for something. Also, a letter knife is only found in museums and may well have a better name among historians and enthusiasts, I don't know, whereas a guillotine is a daily object so it seems weirder for people to not know the word for it...

We do know the word "guillotine"--we simply know it exclusively as a device used for decapitation, so that the idea of using it for an everyday object actually becomes hilariously morbid. :p

[Pole, the]

We do know the word "guillotine"--we simply know it exclusively as a device used for decapitation, so that the idea of using it for an everyday object actually becomes hilariously morbid. :p

I don't get it. What is hilariously morbid in eradicating the human race? I thought it's the natural thing to do.

[Vijay]

We do know the word "guillotine"--we simply know it exclusively as a device used for decapitation, so that the idea of using it for an everyday object actually becomes hilariously morbid. :p

I don't get it. What is hilariously morbid in eradicating the human race? I thought it's the natural thing to do.

Because using it for paper makes paper sound like humans being decapitated!

[Zaarin]

^This.

[linguoboy]

Not really comparable, though - one's losing a well-established, international word for something that has one, the other's not inventing a word for something. Also, a letter knife is only found in museums and may well have a better name among historians and enthusiasts, I don't know, whereas a guillotine is a daily object so it seems weirder for people to not know the word for it...

I guess I must live in the same fluffy duffy world of Dickensian charm as Stephen Fry, since I used a letter opener earlier today. The last time I touched the paper cutter, however, it was to move the damn thing out of the way so I could look for batteries.

I'm now picturing Salmoneus opening correspondence with his teeth.

OT: Ether. I'm not sure where I picked up the pronunciation with stressed /ɛ/ unless it was by backformation from ethereal.

[Zaarin]

Not really comparable, though - one's losing a well-established, international word for something that has one, the other's not inventing a word for something. Also, a letter knife is only found in museums and may well have a better name among historians and enthusiasts, I don't know, whereas a guillotine is a daily object so it seems weirder for people to not know the word for it...

I guess I must live in the same fluffy duffy world of Dickensian charm as Stephen Fry, since I used a letter opener earlier today. The last time I touched the paper cutter, however, it was to move the damn thing out of the way so I could look for batteries.

I'm now picturing Salmoneus opening correspondence with his teeth.

OT: Ether. I'm not sure where I picked up the pronunciation with stressed /ɛ/ unless it was by backformation from ethereal.

I too pronounce it /ˈɛðɹ̩/--I guess it's supposed to be /ˈiθɹ̩/? But I pronounce ethereal /əˈθiɹˤiəl/.

[linguoboy]

OT: Ether. I'm not sure where I picked up the pronunciation with stressed /ɛ/ unless it was by backformation from ethereal.

I too pronounce it /ˈɛðɹ̩/--I guess it's supposed to be /ˈiθɹ̩/? But I pronounce ethereal /əˈθiɹˤiəl/.

I've never pronounced the word with /ð/. That's just plain bonkers.

[Vijay]

The only way I ever remember hearing Indians pronounce ether is [ɛˈd̪ər] ~ [jɛˈd̪ər], which I then had to unlearn.

Which reminds me that it took me the longest time to learn that native speakers of English (generally?) have dental fricatives, not dental stops like in Indian English (and Hiberno-English IIRC).

EDIT: Wait a minute, maybe I'm remembering wrong. Ether has always been a tricky word for me to pronounce. Maybe I made up that pronunciation myself (partly) by analogy with words like father, other, bother, mother, and brother.

[Zaarin]

OT: Ether. I'm not sure where I picked up the pronunciation with stressed /ɛ/ unless it was by backformation from ethereal.

I too pronounce it /ˈɛðɹ̩/--I guess it's supposed to be /ˈiθɹ̩/? But I pronounce ethereal /əˈθiɹˤiəl/.

I've never pronounced the word with /ð/. That's just plain bonkers.

It's a word I originally learned by reading rather than hearing, so by analogy with other words that voice dental fricatives between vowels...I've never bothered to unlearn it except in the compound word "ethernet."

[gmalivuk]

Do you also say "paper cutter thing" for what we call 'scissors'?

So what do y'all call a "letter opener"? An éviscéreuse?

Well I do now!

Not really comparable, though - one's losing a well-established, international word for something that has one

What do you mean "losing"? "Guillotine" was (more or less) the name of the guy credited with inventing the beheding machine, and the word couldn't have meant something other than that device for at least the next several decades before the paper cutter was invented. More likely American English simply never gained the extension in meaning that happened in Britain and areas that remained its colonies for longer.

a guillotine is a daily object so it seems weirder for people to not know the word for it...

The word for it is "paper cutter". Not knowing *your* word for it is different from not knowing "the" word for it.

[linguoboy]

Not really comparable, though - one's losing a well-established, international word for something that has one

What do you mean "losing"?

I guess he's calling it "international" because it's used with that meaning in Iberia? (Perhaps you had that in mind when you said "its colonies".) But the Germans agree with us ("Papierschneider") and the French call it a massicot.

[Travis B.]

The British seem to have the idea that if something is used in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland it is thus international and corresponding forms in North America are not.

[finlay]

salmoneus also lives in a weird london bubble and can't seem to accept that others don't use words the same way as him.

i also had the same problem with "ether" incidentally. i even extended my mental pronunciation to ethereal like [ɛðəˈri:əl] until I eventually realized this is patently false..... also i never connected "ethernet" and "ether" but now it seems obvious...

[Jonlang]

OT: Ether. I'm not sure where I picked up the pronunciation with stressed /ɛ/ unless it was by backformation from ethereal.

I too pronounce it /ˈɛðɹ̩/--I guess it's supposed to be /ˈiθɹ̩/? But I pronounce ethereal /əˈθiɹˤiəl/.

I've never pronounced the word with /ð/. That's just plain bonkers.

I was introduced to the word "ether" as a child playing the Final Fantasy games, where it's a consumable item used to restore some part of the player's stats, usually magic related. I pronounced it /ˈɛðə/. It was only when I started hearing the word "ethernet" that I realised I'd been saying it wrong all my life.

[Pole, the]

a guillotine is a daily object so it seems weirder for people to not know the word for it...

The word for it is "paper cutter". Not knowing *your* word for it is different from not knowing "the" word for it.

I don't know, maybe “paper cutter” is just less exact (you can cut paper in several different ways) than “paper guillotine”, which the meaning can be easily guessed from.

The British seem to have the idea that if something is used in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland it is thus international and corresponding forms in North America are not.

Maybe that's because they understand the word “international”?

[Travis B.]

The British seem to have the idea that if something is used in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland it is thus international and corresponding forms in North America are not.

Maybe that's because they understand the word “international”?

The problem is that it implies that one part of the Anglosphere and that associated with it is somehow better than another part of the Anglosphere and that associated with it just because it is divided up into more countries than the other part of the Anglosphere. The use of "international" here is not neutral in meaning, and implies that people should speak and write like people from the former part of the Anglosphere even if (significantly) less people live there.

[gmalivuk]

Yeah, in this case it definitely had the connotation of "global" rather than merely involving more than one nation. (Especially when contrasted with "Americanisms" that exist in more nations of the Americas than just the United States.)

[jal]

Regardless of the connotations y'all think "international" has, if something is the norm in Britain and/or Ireland and/or Australia and/or New Zealand, but not in the US, it is still international, and if something is only the case in the US, it is not. That's just what "international" means. However, I would suspect that quite often, the US and Canada group together, so that would make US/Canadian use international as well. (And I'm not even touching the question of whether EU English is also "international", even though not native per se.)

Bottom line: don't use the word "international" when describing language use.


JAL

[linguoboy]

So am I the only one who understands "international" in this context as "present in multiple national languages" rather than simply "present in multiple national varieties of the same language"? (Cf. internationalism.)

I don't know, maybe “paper cutter” is just less exact (you can cut paper in several different ways) than “paper guillotine”, which the meaning can be easily guessed from.

This very exactness actually makes it a misnomer when applied to non-guillotine-style paper cutters. In my experience, the typical non-industrial paper cutter looks like this:



Note the positioning of the blade. It doesn't fall straight down, cutting all of the sheet at once like an actual guillotine. It starts on one side and moves to the other--just like scissors, only with more speed and accuracy.

Guillotine-style paper cutters are often called "stack cutters" since they're designed to slice a whole stack of paper sheets at once rather than one at a time. (If you put multiple sheets in a typical paper cutter, it will splay them and you won't get an even cut.) "Guillotine" in American English refers to a specific bookbinding tool which is a stack cutter specifically intended for trimming a text block in order that it can be rebound.

[Vijay]

So am I the only one who understands "international" in this context as "present in multiple national languages" rather than simply "present in multiple national varieties of the same language"? (Cf. internationalism.)

I'm kind of shrugging it off as just Sal exaggerating a bit. Incidentally, I don't even remember ever seeing or hearing an Indian talk about either a paper cutter or a guillotine, apart from my dad while either discussing the French Revolution or (much more often) mentioning the card game inspired by it. I think both of us pronounce it without an /l/.

EDIT: Turns out that "guillotine" can have a very different meaning at least in Indian English: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/bud ... 512403.cms.

[Sumelic]

Note the positioning of the blade. It doesn't fall straight down, cutting all of the sheet at once like an actual guillotine. It starts on one side and moves to the other--just like scissors, only with more speed and accuracy.

Well, the typical guillotine used for heads has a slanted blade, so it wouldn't cut all the sheet at once either. It's true the mechanism is different--rather than rotating about an axis, all the blade falls straight down, but the cutting action is fairly similar.

[gmalivuk]

Stack cutters also have a slanted blade, as far as I know. The point is that the blade moves straight down as in the beheading device, unlike the glorified scossors Brits call a guillotine.

[KathTheDragon]

I've never seen a guillotine as linguoboy understands them - I've only ever seen ones where the cutting mechanism is a blade that runs on a rail, like this:

This may be a UK vs. US thing. Anyway, I wouldn't call what linguoboy showed a guillotine, I'd probably call it a paper cutter.