Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Long-Lived Mistake

Nine minutes into Tuesday's episode, Trebek, whose principal responsibility is to read from a card, read the clue "A SHORT-LIVED CRAZE," pronouncing "LIVED" phonetically as "laivd" (as in rhymes with "jived"). "This could be evidence of decline in Trebek's mental capacity," an almost-certified speech-language pathologist posited. "It reveals a deficit in his orthographic input lexicon, causing him to resort to the orthography-to-phonology conversion route to read."

3 comments:

  1. You're showing your ignorance. He pronounced it correctly.

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  2. You meant "principal"...awwwwwkward

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  3. Usage Note: The pronunciation (-lvd) is etymologically correct since the compound is derived from the noun life, rather than from the verb live. But the pronunciation (-lvd) is by now so common that it cannot be considered an error. In the most recent survey 43 percent of the Usage Panel preferred (-lvd), 39 percent preferred (-lvd), and 18 percent found both pronunciations equally acceptable.

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