Misspellings

“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”

“Perogative”

Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns

I hear or see this occasionally.

Problem:
This is a mispronunciation or misspelling of a valid noun.

Explanation:
The valid noun is “prerogative” — spelled P-R-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E.

The definition of this noun as it is most commonly used is a privilege or right limited to persons of a particular category or to a specific person.

This noun dates back to a Latin adjective in the late 1300s that literally meant voting first.

The noun “prerogative” exemplifies the value of knowing the roots of words in the English language.

The “rogative” portion of the noun is related to the word “interrogative”, which as an adjective usually means conveying or pertaining to a question.

The “pre” portion of the noun means before.

Knowing these two roots makes it easy to understand how the noun “prerogative” refers to a privilege or right limited to a person or specific group of people — such as voting first!

So replacing “pre” with “pe” in “prerogative” produces the nonsense word “perogative”.

I believe that the mispronunciation of “prerogative” as “perogative” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis (and that this, in turns, leads to the misspelling of “prerogative”). It is simpler to say “perogative” — as if it were spelled P-U-H-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — than it is to say “prerogative”.

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:

  • “perogative” — spelled P-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 5,750,000 matches
  • “prerogative” — spelled P-R-E-R-O-G-A-T-I-V-E — 5,610,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have favored the incorrect word over the correct word by a ratio of 1.02-to-1, which is horrible!

Solution:
“Prerogative”