Quote:
Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
And its cousin, the butchering-a-foreign-word-to-sound-more-cultured trick. Like people who pronounce "forte" with two syllables ("for-tay"), when the French word is pronounced simply "fort."
It divides humanity into three distinct classes. At the top, people who use the word with one syllable. Then people who use it to impress but mispronounce it, with unintentionally bourgeois results. Then, at the bottom, the people who don't know what it means anyway.
Alas, it's the people in the top class who have to suffer the odd and pitying looks, like they're the stupid social climbers who overreached their educations.
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The people in the middle win, and the people whom you have identified as on top are the one's whose presumption that we import the foreign word into our language without change qualifies as its own little bit of pretension. Thus, for example, my little Oxford American Dictionary that proved so useful on the other thread shows forte as being pronounced (
for tay) regardless of how the French do it. The bourgeois have prevailed so thoroughly that even the priggish Brits concede that the battle is lost; the aristocracy is no more. Vive la revolution!
