Devolution toward Simpler

“studder”

Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a technical document that I was editing

Problem:
This is a misspelling that comes from a mispronunciation.

Explanation:
I came across this misspelling the other day while helping a company to edit a technical document about an audio signal.

The original author of the document used the misspelling “studder” to refer to an audio stream that was frequently interrupted.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Americans have a penchant for pronouncing the letter “t” as if it were the letter “d”.

So it is not surprising that the word “stutter” — which has two “t”s in the middle — gets pronounced by many Americans as “studder” — as if it had two “d”s in the middle.

I am sure that this mispronunciation is what led to the misspelling in the document that I was editing.

This mispronunciation is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to say “studder” than it is to say “stutter”.

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

  • “stutter” — 1,830,000 matches
  • “studder” — 78,100 matches

This tells me that Web authors have spelled the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 23.4-to-1, which is good but not great.

Solution:
“stutter”

“kindergarden”

Devolution toward Simpler, Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I often hear this pronunciation.

Problem:
This is a mispronunciation and a misspelling.

Explanation:
Americans have a penchant for pronouncing the letter “t” as if it were the letter “d”.

So it is not surprising that the word “kindergarten” — which ends with T-E-N and literally means “children’s garden” in German — gets pronounced by many Americans as “kindergarden” — which ends with D-E-N.

This mispronunciation is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

It is simpler to say “den” than it is to say “ten”.

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

  • “kindergarten” — 37,300,000 matches
  • “kindergarden” — 1,180,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have spelled the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 31.6-to-1, which is very good but not great, especially given more than a million matches for the misspelling.

Solution:
“kindergarten”

“Listing”

Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns

Telephone companies refer to an entry in a telephone book as a “listing”.

Real-estate agents refer to an item in a list of for-sale properties as a “listing”.

But the noun “listing” describes the process of creating a list.

I wonder why such an entry in a list is not called a “listed” instead.

The word “listed” makes as much sense as the word “listing” to refer to an entry in a list.

Perhaps the use of “listing” in place of “listed” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

After all, it is simpler to say “listing” than it is to say “listed”.