Nouns

“He has a temperature.”

Adjectives, Euphemisms, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

This is a popular statement in American English now.

For fun, I searched Google separately for “has a temperature” and “have a temperature” (each with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 589,000 matches and about 427,000 matches, respectively.

But to say that someone “has a temperature” means nothing except for the negative connotation beneath its euphemistic form.

Someone usually says or writes “He has a temperature.” to tell the listener or reader, respectively, that the subject of the sentence has a higher-than-normal temperature.

But the noun “temperature” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “He has a temperature.” or “You have a temperature.”?

The statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “temperature” must be modified by an adjective to give it value.

Otherwise, you are speaking in euphemisms.

“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”