[ExI] silly 'rules'

[William Flynn Wallace]

Now as we all know, there are no laws of nature when it comes to language.
Great writers as well as bad ones use comma splices, incomplete sentences,
and all the rest of the 'taboos'.

I would like to call attention to pronunciation and its 'rules'.

Take 'hypertrophy'.  It's pronounced hyper'trophy. Now if a person who did
not know that word heard it, he likely would not figure it out, whereas if
you said hy'pertrophy he might.

Ditto for circui'tous.  Doesn't cir'cuitous make a lot more sense?

There are hundreds of others in which we apply a 'rule' that makes no sense
at all, and which is actually harmful to understanding our language.

And yet who is complaining about it?  I'll bet Spike would if he thought of
it and could make it a lot funnier than I am, which is to say funny, not
boring.

So let's all get out there and correct people's 'correct' pronunciation and
get them to do it a logical way, eh?  We have to start somewhere and
somewhen.

Bill W
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