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In Pea Are Noose Washing Tin

By Peter Lloyd

I don’t perclaim to permote this sort of thing. Nor do I pertend to suggest the slightest bit of pertention, but it seems that most broadcast perfessonals pernounce all words that begin with pre or pro as if they began with the letters per.

Okay, we all understand what they’re saying. But in the interests of percision, shouldn’t we pertect clarity and pervent confusion? And above all, pertect all the pre and pro words from losing their identities?

It’s a simple matter to understand that a word such as prehistoric contains part of its definition. It refers to a time pre or before history. All the words we use have history. All pre words refer to some sort of predecessor. All pro words clue us into some sort of favoring, the opposite of anti.

When speakers deprive pre and pro words of their roots and history, listeners lose part of the story woven into the word.

But perpare yourself. I perdict that pernunciation, as it percedes through its natural, evolutionary pergress, will eventually lose pre and pro. We’ve already lost the uh sound in most words ending in ton. I noticed this first in news reports concerning Presidint Clintin in Washingtin.

Some professional broadcasters mispronounce the the name of the letter N and make it sound like the pronoun in rather than the letter. I hear this every day when radio news reports conclude with “In pea are noose, washing tin.”

The creative act of using and developing language works just like evolution. Invented by illiterates and crowbarred into a language by grammarians, English roams throughout the world among users of virtually every culture.

Pernunciations that challenge our tongues become extinct as they mutate into sounds that flow more trippingly off the tongue. The surviving forms are those we democratically select. If we lose pre and pro in the percess, blame Darwin.

Peter Lloyd worked for more than two decades in the advertising business as a writer and creative director for small and large agencies and eventually on his own as a freelance writer.

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