How do you pronounce, "Messrs."?
Is it "misters" or "messers"? I don't know, but I see it in print all the time.
Which leads me to a dilemma I bet many of you have as well: Our reading vocabularies exceed our daily speaking vocabularies, a common trait among people who love to read.
Most of the time, our pronunciation befuddlement poses little difficulty. But on those occasions when we want to reach deep and draw out one of our "reading-only" vocabulary words, we either hesitate, fearing ridicule, or we make the leap, risking mispronunciation.
Fortunately, there's help: a book by Charles Harrington Elster called, The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations. Published in 1999 and available on Amazon.com, The Big Book is an entertaining read with a serious purpose: To give voice to people like us by giving us confidence in our speaking vocabularies.
A sample selection:
grievous GREE-vus. Don't say GREE-vee-us.
Be sure to say this word in two, not three, syllables, rhyming it with leave us. The three-syllable GREE-vee-us is an old and stubbornly persistent beastly mispronunciation -- perhaps in part because, as Holt (1937) observes, it is "a common mistake among ministers."
I hope it proves as helpful to you as it has been to me. (Unfortunately, "messrs." isn't in the book, but I choose not to hold that against Mr. Elster.)
Which leads me to a dilemma I bet many of you have as well: Our reading vocabularies exceed our daily speaking vocabularies, a common trait among people who love to read.
Most of the time, our pronunciation befuddlement poses little difficulty. But on those occasions when we want to reach deep and draw out one of our "reading-only" vocabulary words, we either hesitate, fearing ridicule, or we make the leap, risking mispronunciation.
Fortunately, there's help: a book by Charles Harrington Elster called, The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations. Published in 1999 and available on Amazon.com, The Big Book is an entertaining read with a serious purpose: To give voice to people like us by giving us confidence in our speaking vocabularies.
A sample selection:
grievous GREE-vus. Don't say GREE-vee-us.
Be sure to say this word in two, not three, syllables, rhyming it with leave us. The three-syllable GREE-vee-us is an old and stubbornly persistent beastly mispronunciation -- perhaps in part because, as Holt (1937) observes, it is "a common mistake among ministers."
I hope it proves as helpful to you as it has been to me. (Unfortunately, "messrs." isn't in the book, but I choose not to hold that against Mr. Elster.)
3 Comments:
Dictionary seems to clear it up....
Main Entry: Messrs.
Pronunciation: 'me-s&rz
plural of MR. (Messrs. Jones, Brown, and Robinson)
Thanks, Richard.
But how do you pronounce the ampersand between the s and the r? And is it a long e or a short e?
According to m-w.com,
\&r\as ur/er in further
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