Once again, I pretty much lost track of the debate by its end — I was typing furiously and drinking too fast. But I guess I agree that Palin seemed to be merely a bit dim, rather than so cartoonishly stupid that you’d hesitate to trust her with solid food.
She did regress in at least one respect, though: her pronunciation. She managed to say the word “nuclear” perfectly correctly during her convention speech. But last night she adopted the “nucular” formulation favored by grade school boys and our current president. Here, check it out.
There are a few ways to react to this. Wolfson linked to this piece at Language Log today, which perceptively notes that:
Ordinary people, faced with what are for them deviant, “wrong”, bits of language, see nothing but a mistake, period. They are resistant to the linguist’s idea that there could be a rationale for the “mistake”, even a system to it, or that, in fact, the very same thing could result from different sources or represent different systems. (This attitude presents a tough challenge when we teach beginning linguistics courses — not only when we talk about dialects, but also when we talk about language acquisition. One of the hardest lessons for many students is that instead of saying what’s wrong, what people “can’t” or “won’t” do, they should be describing what people *do*, and making hypotheses about *why* they do that.)
On the other hand, this is stupid. It’s nuclear. Everybody knows that. Perhaps someday the situation will become sufficiently muddy that a postmodern assessment of the word’s pronunciation will become appropriate. But we’re not there yet. Right now if you press people — even those who say nucular — most will grudgingly admit that there is a correct pronunciation of the word, and that it doesn’t rhyme with “tubular”.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that linguistics is dumb and the classes I had to take about it in college were awful. So there.
No, I prefer to subscribe to a theory along these lines: namely, that the choice to use the “nucular” pronunciation is increasingly a deliberate one, at least among politicians. I suspect that it’s going to eventually become a sign of party allegiance on the right, a little piece of deliberate ignorance designed to subtly defame members of the “Democrat Party”.
The only other explanation I can think of for the discrepancy in Palin’s pronunciation is that her convention speech was spelled out on the teleprompter (which she didn’t use, mind you!) FO-NET-I-KAL-LEE. I suppose that’s plausible enough — you can take your pick between that or the deliberate mispronunciation explanation. As it so often does when examining modern conservative behavior, it’s a toss up between stupidity and malevolence.
OK, just happened on this post. The “nucular” thing bothered me a lot too, but I heard recently – unfortunately can’t remember where – that this is standard pronunciation amongst actual nuclear power plant engineers. Not sure why that would be, but it could explain why Bush says it – he hangs with energy people.
Yeah, I can buy that. One of the linked articles points out that this is common with regard to nuclear weapons; the new-clear pronunciation is reserved by some for explicitly scientific contexts.
This makes sense, sort of, and is certainly interesting. But I still bristle at it.