“bedroom suit”

Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations, Nouns

I have heard this phrase a lot.

Problem:
It is not a “suit”!

Explanation:
What the heck is a “bedroom suit”?

For that matter, what is a “living-room suit” or a “dining-room suit”?

Okay, I am kidding.

I know what these phrases mean.

I know what the people who say or write them are doing.

They are mispronouncing or misspelling the noun that means a furniture set, most particularly the set of furniture necessary to furnish one room.

That noun is “suite” — NOT “suit”! Talk about NOT Hooked on Phonics.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “bedroom suit” — 9,980,000 matches
  • “bedroom suite” — 9,520,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have favored the incorrect noun over the correct noun by a ratio of 1.05-to-1, which is horrible!

I believe that the favoring of “bedroom suit” over “bedroom suite” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to write and pronounce the four-letter, one-syllable “suit” than it is to write and pronounce the five-letter, 1.5-syllable “suite”.

Solution:
“bedroom suite”