973. "Oppenheimer" leads us to wonder about the "nucular" pronunciation of "nuclear." And why do people have that second capital letter in the middle of MySpace, OutKast, and PowerPoint (and is it grammatically correct)?
973. "Oppenheimer" leads us to wonder about the "nucular" pronunciation of "nuclear." And why do people have that second capital letter in the middle of MySpace, OutKast, and PowerPoint (and is it grammatically correct)?
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/nuclear/transcript
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. "Oppenheimer" just won seven Oscars including Best Picture, and it has people thinking about the word "nuclear," so we'll talk about that this week, and I'll also talk about camel case and a new online use that has made me warm up to it.
by Mignon Fogarty
Here's a listener question:
"Hi, along with the popularity now of the film about Robert Oppenheimer, we are hearing — or rehearing because we haven't heard this so much until recently — the mispronunciation of the word 'nuclear' even by people who should know a lot better. This drives me crazy. There's some other words who are mispronounced in a similar way. For instance the word 'jewelry' is frequently pronounced as jew-ler-y and the word 'realtor' is often pronounced as a 'real-a-tor.' Just all of these make me absolutely cringe, and I just wonder if there are any others. Not that I really desire to hearing them, but this to me is a curiosity, and why does anyone speak this way? Thanks."
Great question. So first, the word "nuclear" comes from "nucleus," so it makes sense that it's pronounced the same way. "Nucleus" comes straight from Latin where the word means "kernel," but it goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European to a root that means "nut." Etymonline says the same root gives us the word "nougat," which is "sweetmeat made of almonds and other nuts." So for a science fair or art project, someone should make a sculpture of a nuclear bomb cloud out of nougat!
Nuclear bombs are called "nuclear" because the explosion comes from reactions that happen in the super-dense core —the nucleus — of an atom.
Now although it's supposed to be pronounced "nuclear," lots of people have been pronouncing it other ways for a long time — and prominent people! George W. Bush is probably the most well known because he was ridiculed for it, but sources say Presidents Clinton and Eisenhower and Vice President Mondale were also heard pronouncing it as "new-cue-ler." And I feel like I've just scratched the surface here too on prominent people who've pronounced it that way! The "nuclear" entry at Merriam-Webster says that in addition to the presidents and vice president, the "new-cue-ler" pronunciation has "been found in widespread use among educated speakers including scientists, lawyers, professors, congressmen, [and] U.S. cabinet members." And they point out that it's not just Americans. British and Canadian people have been heard pronouncing it this way too.
And as the caller noted, "nuclear" isn't the only word that has this kind of problem. People do a similar thing with "jewelry" and "realtor." "Epenthesis" and "metathesis" are words linguists use to describe the kinds of changes you're hearing.
In epenthesis, people insert an extra sound into a word, like how Irish and Scottish people sometimes pronounce "film" as "filum." That "Oppenheimer" was quite a filum!
And people sometimes use epenthesis when they're trying to be funny too, like when Yogi Bear talks about his pic-a-nic basket or when someone who just graduated jokingly says they're "all edumacated now." That "a" you're hearing in "real-a-tor" comes from epenthesis.
Metathesis, on the other hand, involves the swapping of sounds or syllables within a word, and it's also quite common. For example, did you know that the word "bird" was originally "brid," spelled "B-R-I-D? It was metathesis that gave us the modern word "bird"! In the same way, the word "third," was originally "thrid." Metathesis is also why "aks" competes with "ask" and why some people say "perty" instead of "pretty."
And here's an interesting piece of metathesis-related trivia I've mentioned before: According to the American Name Society, Oprah Winfrey's actual first name is spelled O-R-P-H-A, "Orpha," after a character in the Book of Ruth in the Bible, but her family always pronounced it "Oprah."
Metathesis is probably what's going on when people say "jew-ler-y" instead of "jewel-ry" although I've also seen sources say the mispronunciation is the result of epenthesis — inserting the "ler" sound.
It's the same with "nuclear." I've seen sources say that "new-cue-ler" is the result of metathesis and others say it's epenthesis. They're very similar.
But epenthesis and metathesis only DESCRIBE what's happening with these pronunciations. WHY do people do it?
Well, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage has a pretty straightforward idea: maybe "nuclear" is hard to say, and there aren't a lot of other common words with similar sounds to guide people. There aren't none — we have "pricklier," "likelier," and "cochlear" but it's not a lot.
On the other hand, we have "muscular," "spectacular," "vernacular," "peculiar," "particular," "binocular," "molecular," "circular," and more, and those are probably the kinds of words people have more in their minds when they're looking at "nuclear" and trying to remember how to pronounce it. Especially because, as you may have noticed, all those other words have a Q-sound right before the common ending: "musk-Q-ler," "spectac-Q-ler," just like the mispronunciation "nuc-Q-ler."
And "New-cue-ler" isn't the only nonstandard pronunciation of the word either. Merriam-Webster note that President Jimmy Carter pronounced it with two syllables: "new-clr."
But in his 2005 book "Going Nucular," Geoff Nunberg disagrees that "nuclear" is hard to pronounce. He says to try pronouncing it three times fast. No problem. Nuclear, nuclear, nuclear. He tells a story of a "Pentagon wise guy" who worked with nukes and pronounced it "new-cue-ler" on purpose. And he said he only pronounced it that way when he was talking about weapons, not in other phrases, like if he were talking about nuclear families. So it seemed to be some kind of insider joke or maybe a power play against the engineers he said sometimes gave him a hard time for pronouncing it that way.
Pointing out that George W. Bush would have certainly heard the word "nuclear" pronounced correctly his whole life from his father, George H.W. Bush, who said it the standard way, and during his Ivy League education, Nunberg wonders whether the "new-cue-lar" pronunciation was something that rubbed off from the "Pentagon wise guy" types or if Bush was doing it on purpose to be folksy. Hard to say. I looked for videos of him saying the word when he was younger and of him talking about nuclear families, but I didn't have any luck. If you ever come across anything like that, let me know!
I'll end this segment with a couple of fun anecdotes from the "nuclear" entry in Garner's Modern English Usage.
First, apparently in an "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine in 2001, William Safire suggested that because so many presidents had mispronounced the word, speech writers should use the phonetic spelling in speeches.
And second, Garner says in 2012, he asked Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, "whether the pronunciation of 'nuclear' had ever been discussed in his presence in the Oval Office." And Card answered, "Endlessly."
Thanks again for the question!
by Mignon Fogarty
You know about uppercase and lowercase, but do you know about camel case? Well, even if you don't know the name, you've definitely seen it.
Camel case is when letters in the middle of words or a string of words are capitalized. Most often the capital letters in the middle seem to come from squishing words together that would normally be separated by a space, such as PlayStation and YouTube, but occasionally the capital seems to just pop up at a convenient syllable, like in the band name OutKast that has a capital K in the middle. Camel case gets its name from the capital letter in the middle of the word looking like the hump of a camel.
People disagree about whether it's technically camel case if the first letter of the name is capitalized too. Some people call it camel case either way, but other people call it Pascal case or upper camel case when the first letter of each word is capitalized — including the first letter of the whole thing, like "YouTube" and "PlayStation" — and call it lower camel case when the first letter of the whole thing is lowercase, like you see in "iPhone" and "eBay." But I'm just going to call it all camel case today.
The name Pascal case, though, is a big clue about where the practice originated. Although the phenomenon can be traced back to at least the 1950s, it gained steam among computer programmers (probably because spaces are disallowed in some programming languages) so a convenient way to highlight multiple words in a file name or a variable was to capitalize the first letter of each squished-together word. And more recently, marketers decided it was a way to make a company name look cool.
It may also have gotten some gas from domain names, which of course also don't have spaces. If you're running it all together in your URL — like QuickAndDirtyTips.com — some people would just go ahead and write the company name the same way, without any spaces. But then it's hard to read, so you fix it by capitalizing the first letter of every word.
And it's kind of interesting that camel case seems all modern and trendy because writing words without spaces is actually an ancient practice. Words were written this way — all run together without spaces between them — in late Classical Latin and Classical Greek until at least the 7th or 8th century.
Today, aside from the marketing and programming uses that I've talked about in the past, camel case has also become important for people who use screen readers, particularly for hashtags, which by their nature, don’t have spaces between words. When you write a hashtag in all lowercase, screen readers, which are devices that read digital text out loud … these screen readers can’t always tell where the words start and end, and the software reads the hashtags the way they might sound if they were all one long weird word.
For instance, an example created by accessibility expert Adrian Roselli, shows how a screen reader interprets the hashtag #harderforallusertoread when it's written in all lowercase instead of using camel case to capitalize the first letter of every word, and it comes out as kind of like "harder for ossers toe red” — making it much harder to understand than #HarderForAllUsersToRead with each word capitalized, which allows the screen reader to recognize each word and read it right.
And capitalizing each word in a hashtag isn’t just for people who use screen readers either. It's easier for everyone to read multi-word hashtags when each word is capitalized, and you don't have to make that extra effort to figure out what each word is. And sometimes it's hard to tell, or at least it's funny.
BigDogKC recently told me on Facebook about a company called O'Neill Honda in Overland Park, Kansas City, saying their URL, which also appears in lowercase on their license plate frames, is oneillhonda.com, which can look like "one ill Honda," which is, "not a good message for the sales staff, but perhaps a promo for the service department?"
And after posting a picture of what to me was just a stock art mansion and then having lots of people from Portland recognize it as the Pittock Mansion in Portland, Oregon, and make comments, I joked that I should switch to doing just mansion content and delighting people in different cities by posting a picture of a new mansion every week. And Scamper on Threads replied "“themanorgirl” would be an unexpected side gig…" which in all lowercase is a funny new example of handles that mean different things depending on the capitalization: was it The Manor Girl or The Man Or Girl?
So when it comes to camel case, don't use it willy nilly, but do use it for formal company names, like PayPal, and in hashtags and other places where it helps to make the meaning clear.
And finally, here's a fun tidbit about why we call letters uppercase and lowercase. It has to do with actual cases or trays. When compositors set type by hand for letterpress printing, with individual metal letters, the big letters are kept in one case and the little letters are kept in another case. The way the two cases are typically arranged has the big uppercase letters literally in a case on the top, and the lowercase letters are literally in a more convenient lower case or container since they are used more often. So uppercase and lowercase are just descriptions of where printers put the cases that hold the different letters.
Finally, I have a familect story.
"Hi, Mignon. I've been pondering whether to send this since it doesn't really seem to qualify as a … blanking on the name now. The word that my family uses, but only my family uses. Well, it was only used once other than my mom telling the story. When I was in kindergarten, she had to leave to pick me up and told my sister, two years old, to get dressed. And when she asked my sister if she was ready, she said, 'I've got one clo on,' thinking that the singular of clothes must be clo. And I just decided to send it because you mentioned clothes as being a plural only noun."
Thanks! That's funny. It kind of reminds me of how people mistakenly think the word "kudos" is plural and will talk about a "kudo."
Tell me your familect! That's what we call words used by your family and only your family. You can leave me a voicemail with your story at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story behind your familect because that’s always the best part.
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Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings; marketing assistant, Kamryn Lacey; audio engineer, Nathan Semes; and director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.