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17 February 2007
MetaWhat? I'm listening to the MeFi podcast, and Jessamyn has just brought something to my attention. →[More:] Which one is it? May-tuh-filter, or meh-tuh-filter?! Have I been mispronouncing it all this time?
Now I have to subtly change my pronunciation when talking about both MeFi and MeCha.
Yes, both sites frequently come up in conversation with my roommate.
No, I have no life.
And I have to add it to my list of mispronounced words, alongside asterisk (Azertisk), anecdote (an-sih-dote. I blame this on the constant mispronunciations of my elementary school teachers), "fl oz" (I can only attribute this to some kind of fluke accident when I was learning to read as a child. I must have learned about "flouride" and this measurement at roughly the same time, and basterdized "flouride" into "floural" so that I read "fl oz" as "Floural Ounces." Jeez), "avatar" (ay-vay-ter. Almost like aviator), and formerly "etc" (which for the longest time I pronounced as "ek seteruh," once again due to the near constant mispronunciations of elementary school teachers. But I managed to fix that. I'm currently working on fixing anecdote.)
I don't even wnat to know how to pronounce delmoi's username. I don't need any more words added to my list. Lord knows how many words I forgot, and how many more words I'm not aware I'm mispronouncing.
"... Lord knows how many words I forgot, and how many more words I'm not aware I'm mispronouncing."
posted by CitrusFreak12 17 February | 01:52
Get 'em fixed while you're young, cf12. And keep working on your list all your life, if needs be. There's nothing sadder than a forty year old tripping over a common word, who gets that guilty look on his/her face that says "Oh, sh*t! I've done it again." about the time you and everyone else in earshot realizes they've been mispronouncing that word all their life.
Spell checkers will get better and more ubiquitous. But pronunciation, you'll have to keep doing in real time, all by your lonesome.
Ooooh, there was a huge discussion about this at one of the London meet ups last year. I think we ending up agreeing to disagree, but London meetups tend to be drunken affairs and I really can't remember what the outcome was. All I know is that I'd been pronouncing it apparently wrong for years.
hugsnkisses's judgement at that meetup was that it was Mee-Fye (I agree) but this triggered an hour-long debate. languagehat disagrees, though. Truly it is a disagreement that threatens to tear apart the Church of Metafilter and I for one eagerly await a edict from Pope Matt Haughey the First. We can expect 95 theses on the pronunciation to be posted to the front page of the blue fairly soon, I'm sure.
Is that rabbit gonna hit me with a spanner? Like walk up to me being all I'm a cute rabbit that wouldn't hurt anyone and then whack! whack! whack! or is it more of an I'm a harmless rabbit and then it unbolts everything in my home?
Mee-fie is just bonkers, unless folk really do pronounce the word 'meta' as 'meeeta' and 'filter' as 'file-ter', in some strange Spanish/German hybrid accent. (Of course, by that rationale, I bonkers-pronounce WiFi and HiFi.)
I'm not sure, but I think that rabbit's going to use the wrench to smash the state and seize the means of production. She's a parody of Miffy, and she shills for radical vegetarian direct action.
We've talked about pronunciation a billion times, here and there. My votes:
Metafilter = Meh-Tuh-Filter
MeFi = Mee-Fie
Mefites = Mee-Fights
MeTa = Meh-Tuh
MetaChat = Meh-tuh-chat (rhymes with "hat" not like the French word for "cat")
MeCha = Meh-kuh
Mechazens = Meh-kuh-zens
No, it's not. There are plenty of incidences in English where vowel sounds change when words are shortened. It's not a process governed by logic, but by cognates. We already have the word 'me', so it's very natural to pronounce the 'me' in "MeFi" in the same way. Similarly, we're familiar with a 'Fi' in the form of 'Semper Fi' and also in the folktale Jack and the Beanstalk, where the giant says 'Fee Fi Fo Fum." It's quite natural to pronounce the abbreviation so that the syllables match pronounciations which already exist in the language. This isn't completely subjective; it's a common process in English and I wish I could think of another example (where the shortened form has different vowel sounds than the full word).Anyway, to insist on a rigidly exact rendering of the same vowel sounds as in the full word is to wrench the sound of the word into an uncomfortable, unnatural shape. Meffy? Huh?
For these reasons, Mee-Fie has always seemed the most natural English pronunciation to my ears. Similarly, I pronounce MeCha 'Mee Cha', keeping the soft 'ch' sound that it has in the original word, and because we have the 'cha cha' as a similar sound in our language already. "Mecca" means the place with the Ka'aba, so I don't like to pronounce them in a way that's confusing.
My other determinations:
MeTa: Mee-Tah
AskMe: Ask me
Metafilter Music: Mu-Fie (though I sure wish he'd gone with "Hi-Fi"
Metafilter Jobs: Metafilter Jobs
Yay! I found an excellent piece on this very topic. One of the examples of how the vowel undergoes a change in its 'spelling pronounciation' is in the shortened word for "Company" in company names like "Sunoco (Sun Oil Company). Though we pronounce 'company' like 'kuhm-pah-nee', when we use just the "co" we pronounce it "Koh".
Other examples from that piece which show a preference for making shortened words resemble the pronounciation of existing words, rather than keeping the vowel sound of the full original word:
SoHo
SoCal
HoJo's
Po-mo
Hi-fi
Sci-fi
Since "MeFi" and all its children are neologisms, there really isn't a definitive 'right' way (and some would argue there's no 'right' way to pronounce any word, though thankfully we don't live in a world where people create independent pronunciations all the time). What history shows is that over time, speakers of the word will collectively settle on a common pronunciation that feels natural in most dialects. I hypothesize that this will happen more slowly because we usually are typing at each other rather than speaking at each other, so we're continually surprised to hear people pronouncing the words differently than we do. However, through the meetup process and things like this podcasting and media mentions, one dominant pronunciation is likely to bubble up to the top. And my money's on "Mee-fie" and "Mee-cha".
[I get that folks in the "Mecca" crowd are basing their pronunciation on the abbreviation's visual similarity to the first two syllables in 'mechanical', but that seems like a stretch to me]
Mecha as mekka is actually fairly common with anime and different robot and machine based areas of research and fantasy, but honestly, i think mecha and only put on the mekka when it suits, much like the french cat.
No doubt 'mecca'/'mekka' is the dark horse in this race, but, between the robots and the holy place, I think it's got a decent shot at becoming the preferred pronunciation.
I have since infancy cultivated an alternate subvocalization scheme to foil any mindreaders who might come into existence during my lifetime. One consequence of this is that when I see MeFi, it becomes FwamTok.
Speaking for myself, I'll just go ahead and keep pronouncing it "Meh-fie," because that's what makes sense to me. I'm not sure that mathowie is really in a position to dictate pronunciation at this point.
I just popped in to say that I listened to the podcast on the way home last night and it was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. it is the first time I have actually heard any of those usernames spoken out loud. Apart from that, I had a smile on my face the whole way through.
Also, anyone who can speak English proper knows it is pronounced Meffy.
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