Perfect

Pop Larkin from The Darling Buds of May won himself a place in the Oxford English Dictionary by saying things like: ‘Perfick wevver! You kids all right at the back there?’ So it was some surprise to find a couple of television advertisements mispronouncing perfect in quite a different way. They say the second syllable as though it were spelled fecked, as in the stressed syllable of effect. Perfect has a long and complicated history, and was never pronounced with the ‘c’ at all in the Middle Ages. The old pronunciation is preserved in the surname Parfitt (an occupational name, for an apprentice who was trained or perfect in his trade, as Chaucer’s knight was parfit in chivalry).

In the 16th century, the ‘c’ was introduced in spelling, as part of a trend to reclassicise words. A ‘c’ was similarly inserted into scissors, as though the word came from the Latin scindere (and not, indirectly, from caedere), and into Arctic to make it more ‘correct’. Pronunciation then followed the spelling. So, as far as the inclusion of the letter ‘c’ goes, Pop Larkin was at one with Elizabeth I, who, in her translation of Boethius, says of the well-dressed personification of philosophy: ‘Her wides [weeds] they were of smalist [finest] thrides [threads], parfaict for fine workmanship.’

It was the dropping of the final ‘t’ that was meant to make Pop Larkin sound unlettered. This comic convention was already two centuries old when H.E. Bates used it in his novel. Smollett had done the same thing in Humphrey Clinker, in one of the letters penned by Win Jenkins, whom we are supposed to laugh at for being Welsh and half-literate. ‘I have met with so many axidents, suprisals, and terrifications,’ she writes, ‘that I am in a parfeck fantigo.’