i can see a team of archaeologists giving eachother high-five's in the year 3126 when this thread is found. "I told you Nigel, they DID use a silent L sound in caulk back when they spoke English! You owe me 500 pesos!"

Nice foresight, blending British names with Mexican currency. lol

yes, but the name will be pronounced nee he. they've combined spanish pronunciation with our affinity for silent L's, of course.

Sucking caulk....


*


*


Now that's an esoteric vice.

It took me a while to work out why this was funny. Some Americans pronounce caulk the same as another word that shouldn't be said on air in the USA. I pronounce these words differently (even though I do not pronounce the "l" in "caulk" either), so the significance wasn't immediately apparent.

Americans with the cot-caught vowel merger do sound pretty funny sometimes to those of us who distinguish these vowels.

Walk, wok.

* When you walk a dog, you put it on a lead and walk around with it for a while.
* When you wok a dog, you cut it into small strips and fry it in hot oil with vegetables.

Stir-fried Fido, anyone?

And then there are those half-brights who pronounce the T in often.

Guess I'm only a half-bright then, I certainly pronounce it.

Me too. Sometimes. Mostly in fact. Indeed, most people I know do. Must be a dialect thing.


I wish I was like UG. It must be great to be able to so accurately judge people's intelligence levels and educational achievements based purely on their dialect/pronunciation, or grammatical errors.

Yes, why wouldn't you pronounce the t in often? Do you not pronounce the first r in February, and the h in what, where and when?

I uh- pronounce the t in often.

Well better half-bright than not bright at all! :)

England is a country of half-brights.
Near everyone I know pronounces the t in often, albeit in a swallowed kind of way.

I think you only pronounce it offen if you are really posh :P

The use of 'anxious' when the word should be 'eager' bugs the snot out of me. Yes, I know that some dictionaries now have that as one possible meaning. Writing guides still strongly recommend using them as originally defined.

I understand about the whole 'living language' argument. But it seems to me that, in cases like these, the language is the worse for it. Words that once had a precise and useful meaning are now more bland and less useful.

Hey, the living language embiggens us all.

Oh oh oh...I hate it when someone uses "yet" when they mean "still" as in "Do you have that recipe yet?" What they mean to ask you is if you kept the recipe because they had given it to you last month, and wondered if you still had it in your possession.

Drives me batty.