‘Six!’ cried my husband, waving his notebook as he monitored the by-elections. He wasn’t counting Reform wins but the ways of pronouncing mayoralty.
The most inventive seemed to be Jonny Dymond on Radio 4, who called them mayoralities, introducing an i, as in words such as realities or moralities. Although mayoralities wasn’t exactly the required word, it sounded much better than the popular but hideous method of basing its pronunciation on mayor as if it consisted in two syllables, may and or, with the second stressed.
It is not as though mayoralty was invented in the 21st century along with the vogue for elected mayors, beginning with poor old Ken Livingstone in Greater London. The word has been around since the 14th century, when Richard Whittington was the proper mayor of London and the Mercers were petitioning for ‘the eleccion of Mairaltee’ to be limited to the free men of the City. Perhaps if we’d preserved that spelling mairaltee (derived from the word’s Anglo-Norman origins), we’d all be able to pronounce it.
It became harder when the set spelling became mayor, to reflect its pre-Norman derivation from the Latin maior. That didn’t mean that anyone should have started to pronounce it maior, any more than they changed their pronunciation of scissors when Renaissance printers began to spell sisours in a new way, to suggest an erroneous origin from Latin scindere. In 2012 I mentioned that Alexander Pope spelt may’r with an apostrophe in case readers were tempted to give it two syllables. Since then, the pronunciation of mayoralty has gone from bad to worse, in parallel with the development of the institution. Now we have ‘metro mayors’ of places like Greater Lincolnshire. Metro comes from the Greek for ‘mother’, but the county of Lincoln is far from a city-state motherland. Nor, I suspect, did every voter realise that their metro mayor has the chance to sit on the Mayoral Council of England once every three months under the chairmanship of Angela Rayner. So up with democracy, say I, but easy on the mayors.
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