A Word Nerd Rants

Coupon: COO-pon

Anything else is just wrong. Sorry.

This has been a longtime pet peeve of mine. Not just this one word, but common mispronunciation of words in general that I think might be a unique product of regional psychology. I'll explain.

Coupon. From the French word "couper," meaning "to cut." It seems so straightforward, and it is in pretty much the entire English-speaking word except for the South, where much of the time you're liable to hear "cyoo-pon" instead. You'll hear educated, professional people saying "cyoo-pon" as if it's remotely logical or linguistic to see C-O-U and think, "that's pronounced CYOO."

This drives me up the wall, even moreso than double negatives or "ain't." In my experience, saying something like "I ain't got no (whatever one has none of)" is a product of ignorance, and that's understandable. What is NOT understandable is educated people who should know better persisting in flat-out mispronouncing words, just because. I'm no expert on language (just a card-carrying Word Nerd), but in my anecdotal experience, the desire to appear to be educated is behind a lot of common mispronunciations.

Like "often." It's supposed to be "OFF-en," the T being silent, as in "listen."

A friend I had in college always pronounced the word "tavern" as "TAV-ren," order of letters be damned. She said that the "ern" sound made her feel like she "sounded ignorant," which I interpreted to mean, "sounded country." (Because mispronouncing a simple word doesn't make you sound ignorant AT ALL.) This was also one of the people (more than one, sadly) I've met in my life who refused to use the proper words for genitalia, because they "sounded dirty"... as opposed to something like "vajayjay," because that's obviously so dignified... anyway.

Anyway, I think my friend was on to something. Nobody wants to sound stupid, or unsophisticated, or unschooled. I think that Southerners, and surely rural people everywhere, are particularly sensitive to this. We've been lectured about our lazy enunciation, so we react by super-enunciating everything in order to seem more sophisticated than we are.

And, like the self-conscious hostess of a party I attended once who spent the whole night telling her guests, "You can't drink white wine out of that glass; that's a red wine glass!" we just end up looking silly. What about simple syllables is so threatening?

It's coo-pon. It's off-en. It's "regardless," and it's tavern.

I am the world's biggest proponent of regional dialect. You can pry my "y'all" and my "reckon" and my "yonder" from my cold, dead hands. But saying words the wrong way doesn't get you anything from dirty looks and frustration from people who know better. You, really, really, really don't have to work that hard to convince people that you're awesome.