It's Feb-ROO-ary, Not Feb-YOO-ary

Today is February 1, and it's the perfect opportunity to celebrate the sanctity of language.  I've noticed that most people pronounce "February" without the first "r."  It comes out as Feb-yoo-ary.  That's not correct.  That first "r" is quite alive and necessary.

Now, I understand that language changes and evolves.  I get that it does, and that it's necessary.  Every year, an average of 800 words are added to the dictionary while still others become archaic and out of use.  That's fine and dandy, but I don't think there's any excuse for abusing common words.  Mispronouncing "February" is incorrect and just plain lazy.

Austen talks about why Samuel Johnson created the first dictionary.  Basically, he was concerned that the English language would keep changing so much that it would become unrecognizable.  He feared that it might be as hard to read English in two hundred years as it is to read Chaucer's Middle English. (I took a whole class in college on Chaucer, and we had to read the texts in Middle English with no translation.  It really was like reading a foreign language.)  He created the dictionary to standardize the language.  Which is why we can read texts from three hundred years ago and pretty much understand it.  (Speaking of dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary only lists one pronunciation for "February," and it includes the first "r.")

It's the same reason why some people lament the decline of teaching cursive in elementary schools.  With the advent of computers, cursive doesn't seem necessary.  But if we don't learn cursive, then how are we going to read texts like the Declaration of Independence?  Being able to read handwritten documents would become obsolete, and we'd have to depend upon translations.

So  let's not require a translation for February ("Oh, back in the olden days, they used to pronounce that first 'r.'  Isn't that weird?"). 

Use the first "r."  :)

Comments

[Austen]

Funny you should write about this and mention me. I have been making a real effort to pronounce it correctly this year. I'm hoping the "roo" will eventually roll off my tongue as easily as the "yoo." I think the reason I (used to) say it the wrong way has more to do with dialect than laziness. But when is dialect an excuse and when isn't it? That's a topic I'd like to see someone tackle.

[Dawn Goldberg]

Dialect is a big one. I grew up in Texas, so I had plenty of time to observe strange pronunciations. I had an English teacher (!) pronounce Massachusetts as Massa-tosh-us. I never got that one. People said "warsh" all the time as in "The winduh's dirty. We gotta warsh it." My classmates made fun of me for pronouncing 10 as ten (rhymes with "pen"). They all said "tee-en."

Is it laziness? Or just the way you're brought up and mimicking what you hear? I think a dialectician needs to weigh in!

Good on ya for trying to say it correctly! (Our weatherman said last night he was going to say "February" correctly so that his school teachers wouldn't come find him. I thought it was great!) I'll be ROOting you on all the way!

[Kate Gladstone]

Re:

"But if we don't learn cursive, then how are we going to read texts like the Declaration of Independence? Being able to read handwritten documents would become obsolete, and we'd have to depend upon translations."

Most civilized nations cannot read their founding documents in the original.

The English, for instance, have the Magna Carta -- written in Latin in an elaborate twelfth-century handwriting style not taught today. England remains England, nonetheless -- so I think that the USA would remain the USA even if third-graders stopped learning to write in the style of their ancestors. In any case, learning to read cursive takes about 1 hour with proper teaching (much less time than it takes to learn to write cursive). I have taught five- and six-year-olds to read cursive if they could read print, so why assume that just because you don't write cursive you can't ever learn how to read it?

[aaron hardy]

there's no such thing as sanctity of language. there's never been a golden age of the english language.