‘I can’t abide stigmata,’ said my husband, not through aversion to St Francis of Assisi, but by way of joining in this week’s craze, provoked by the BBC, of nominating a pet hatred among pronunciations.
‘I can’t abide stigmata,’ said my husband, not through aversion to St Francis of Assisi, but by way of joining in this week’s craze, provoked by the BBC, of nominating a pet hatred among pronunciations. My husband hates stigmata with the second syllable stressed, as in tomato.
It’s STIGm’ta for him, just as stomata is STOm’ta and anathemata (like David Jones’s) is ana-THEE-mata. As for anathema maranatha, a phrase from the First Epistle to the Corinthians (16:22), who can say? The Oxford English Dictionary says maranatha is pronounced mara-NAY-tha but ought to be m’RAN-atha. The word belatedly changed meaning, being taken for centuries as an intensifier of anathema, as if ‘the highest degree of excommunication’. Since the 19th century, maranatha has become devotional, giving its name to churches. Today its pronunciation tends to be mara-NATH-a.
Short words can be even trickier. Someone wrote in the papers last week that he had never heard anyone say she for ski. I do remember a joke in a children’s book, from before the second world war, that, if he is ‘sheing’, is she ‘heing’? The use of an authentic Norwegian pronunciation for the fashionable sport seemed only right. The OED used to prefer she as the English pronunciation. Today it lists ski alone. If we had found the sport earlier, we’d say shide, for that is the dialect development of an Old English word, scid, ‘a piece of cleft wood’, which is what the Norwegians meant by ski. The English skid comes from the same source, but attempts to speak of mountain skidding came to nothing.
Two other words that the BBC had doubts about in the late 1920s were fabric and ceramic. Fabric could then be pronounced FAY-bric, now a lost possibility. Ceramic could be pronounced, indeed spelt, keramic. In the 1920s, it was a word scarcely 80 years old in English.
Language changes, if it does not evolve. I bought some yogurt in Sainsbury’s called Amoré. It has been going since 2003, apparently. The accent must be intended to ensure we pronounce it as Dean Martin did in his hit from 1952: ‘When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool [ie, pasta e fagioli]/ That’s amore.’ I fear some people now say am-o-RAY.
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