I am not a stickler when it comes to English usage or pronunciation. In conversation, I don’t care whether people misuse words here or there. This post may contain misplaced commas and unclear antecedents. But things have gotten scary in terms of pronunciation and I am beside myself. We have a contagion of mispronunciation that is diminishing our public discourse.

Very often I find myself watching a video and nodding affirmatively with what I think is an enlightened explanation of some economic trend or social phenomenon. Then suddenly the creator comes out with a mispronunciation so bad that it stops me in my tracks: “With big corporations buying up single-family homes and interest rates stubbornly high, people can’t find housing, ex-pecially young families.”

Huh? Ex-pecially? Dude! I was following your logic there for a bit but now you have blown your credibility and I am unfollowing you. If you don’t know how to pronounce “especially” then how can I take you seriously?

Am I missing something here? Is this a new word, perhaps a portmanteau mashup of “especially” and “for example?” Does “ex-pecially” mean a special example?

Am I losing my mind? What is going on with pronunciation? Are people learning English in text messages where they never hear the spoken word?

Spoiler alert: I am older than dirt.

Why are young people — these are native English speakers — saying PHOTOgrapher instead of phoTOgrapher? “I’m not a writer or a painter, I am a PHOTOgrapher.”

No you’re not. You’re a phoTOgrapher. And that’s a “ta” not a “toe.”

If these simple, common words are said wrong, what hope is there for notoriously hard-to-pronounce things like “applicable,” “mischievous,” “epitome,” or “nuclear.” Fuhgeddaboudit!

The “Mines” Field

Another, even more egregious case in point is “mines.” Apparently a large collective of Americans of all ages and ethnic backgrounds use “mines” as the first-person singular possessive pronoun. If something isn’t yours, ours, theirs, his or hers, then it is (wait for it) mines.

No, you didn’t hear that wrong, and the reason I know that you didn’t hear that wrong is because now people are actually spelling it with the “s.”

This language offense is not redeemable because “mines” is not just a mispronunciation (mispronounciation?), it is a totally made-up word. We’re in trouble folks. If you thought that the mere rending of our democracy by axis infiltration of fascist ideology into the American press was a problem, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. We are losing our native tongue because we don’t talk to each other anymore. We only type messages and then create and watch streaming videos. Today, oral communication goes only one way; we send but don’t receive. But learning pronunciation is a two-way street.  

Mispronunciation of common words is a symptom of a much larger problem. We may talk at each other but we don’t listen to each other anymore. In the electronic public square, we do not have public discourse. We are making up our own language like twins speaking in tongues.

I wish it were due to cross-cultural exposure or the influence of other languages. But I’m not talking about widely accepted or regional usage. African Americans and Southerners often say “ax” instead of “ask” in a common colloquialism. Bostonians soften the “r,” similar to British English. Midwesterners harden the “r”. EX-etera. (Oy vey!)

I am talking about new, completely random, arbitrary mispronunciation that is perpetuated because people have never heard the word said right in their lives. This gradual disintegration of pronunciation may erode spoken English into extinction. The world’s fiat language may die off like the song of the Hawaiian Kaua’i ‘o’o bird. (And no, I don’t know how to pronounce that.)

Understandably, there are a lot of words that people have never heard. “Fiddlesticks, I forgot my galoshes and blunderbuss!” But the real problem is that the use of social media has replaced good old-fashioned conversation. People are learning language in a vacuum, leading to vacuous minds. Haphazard pronunciation suggests that people have never heard essential words and never will. We should worry that this means that they have never heard essential ideas and never will.