“A critical reading of the article exposes two ironies that are obfuscated by metaphoric rhetoric. First, the anthropologist will document the Inuit language to ‘save’ it before it disappears. Documentation as language salvation has become the operative metaphor used by language experts. The irony is that the documents are artefacts of a living language and not the living language itself. Second, the confusion between the living language and the documentary artefacts has misplaced expert attention on the
language as a code rather than language as the conduit and catalyst for social relationships. The irony lies in the fact that the experts are interested in the language as a code, but not the speakers who use the code. These two ironies are obscured by metaphors that capture the popular imagination; specifically, language is articulated as a biological organism that is undergoing species endangerment from outside forces. The metaphor makes it possible to uncouple endangered languages from the community of speakers. This disembodiment of language from speakers reifies language as the object of value that must be ‘saved’, while the speakers are relegated to the role of unwitting casualties victimised by processes greater than themselves.”
— Zombie Linguistics: Experts, Endangered Languages and the Curse of Undead Voices
There is an old belief in Serbian villages and small towns that certain pumpkins (and watermelons), when left outside during a full moon, will turn in to a vampire.
Why I never mock or even bring attention to mispronunciation in a conversation, and will snap down anyone who tries to
Besides poverty, for many peoplevEnglish is a second (or third+) language and has weird rules too.
Most of the time, even when words are mispronounced, they’re still understandable if you make an effort. Just be patient and don’t look down on people who mispronounce!
i don’t think it’s poverty, tho. as i grew up, my family gradually went from working class to upper middle class, and at no point did i hear those “i know how to spell it but not pronounce it” words in conversation. not when we were the hicks with the firewood trailer in the yard, and not when we were the ‘executive fast track’ couple and their scrubbed and shining heirs. people just generally don’t use ‘em. they’re not conversation words.
like, my dad went from being a motorcycle racer who was majoring in engineering, to a senior engineer at a big firm with DoD contracts, and the only thing that changed about the vocabulary of the people he associated with was the technical jargon. instead of motorcycle racing jargon they used materials engineering jargon. they didn’t use words like ‘confluence’ and ‘lambaste’ and ‘chicanery’.
where i heard them was in documentaries on PBS. and that’s free for everyone.
Yeah, this isn’t a poverty thing. My mother was middle class, with a highly advanced vocabulary; my dad was a college graduate working at IBM. All of us were native English speakers. I still mispronounced everything because I read so much, I would almost always encounter any sophisticated word in writing before I encounted it in speech. So for years I said things like “ME-tabolism” (as opposed to “me-TAH-bolism”). For that matter I pronounce one of my favorite characters’ names wrong because I didn’t know he was named after a real-world device; his name is a common word with an -o tacked on at the end, so that’s how I pronounced it. It was a decade after I started reading comics with him in them before he first appeared in any spoken-language media I was able to consume.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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