Is Bush EVER going to learn how to pronounce nuclear?!?

That should be a basic requirement for ANYONE in government.

He doesn't know polls and doesn't use a dictionary! Why do you hate america?

eom

just to show he can get by with it.

...Cuber. The better reason is that "*" is too faqing stupid.

admitting he was wrong wouldn't it?

No way can he navigate a word with all those syllables strung together.

when he correctly pronounced 'Geopolitically' in reference to CAFTA?
He looked like he thought he just pulled off the Ultimate Cheer!
"Who's that with the big vocabularEEE?"
"It's ME! It's ME!"

Bush* is Never Wrong just ask him or any republican...

It's just we look down on some dialects as socially inferior, but think others are ok, and yet others are great.

Most people don't speak the "prestige" NBC English (as I learned to call it years ago), the accent that's considered accentless. Southern dialects have never really been prestige for the last 100 years, so we all know those southerners are loutish and inferior. They drawl, another indication of intellectual, and probably moral, torpor. Neither have backwoods northern dialects had much prestige, but Maine fishermen, what can you expect? Them foreigners in Britain and New Zealand, well, they're foreigners. Educated city dwellers look down on the south and the backwoods, and consider cities to be "superior" in every way: so city dialects tends to be ok, as long as they aren't too working class or minority based. You know, those darkies wind up speaking funny ... obviously inferior speech means inferior intellect. And factory workers just don't have the smarts to speak proper English, fitting in with the correct, white, uppermiddle class prescriptive norm.

And we've identified specific markers to identifying those "lesser" than us, to make our job of identifying degenerates easier, and so that people that want to belong to the "right" social group can remedy their horrid pronunciations and abandon their loser families and friends. The markers mostly pronounciation, or some folksy, illogical things like double negatives, split infinivites, "It is I" or the clearly aberrant grammaticalization of "fixin' to". "Nookyular" is one, and you've done a great service in reminding us just how much insight inferior dialects and pronunciations provide.

However, when teaching an elementary general ed introduction to language course, this kind of view is one that we liberal pink-o academics routinely expose as founded in a complete lack of facts, but having its base in social, class, and racial prejudices, and in an abysmal lack of understanding of how language (as language, not as a social phenomenon) works. Attitudes towards Carter's, Kennedy's, and Bush's accents say much more about society than their accents say about language. Social climbing and acute class divisions show up in speech rather quickly, and as people try to change their social standing, they try to change their speech patterns to as to be accepted in their target social group. Whether it's working class New Yorkers, or jocks in Detroit.

Kennedy keeps his accent to show solidary with his people, and because its seen as a sort of prestige. * keeps his because he doesn't give a dang about that particular outmoded social prejudice, and also out of solidarity. The relative judgments and judgmentalisms about accent could easily be reversed.

...it's about mispronounciation of a word, not his accent.

specific words. Sound change (language change in general) tends to go word by word.

I'm not sure about how "nukylar" came about, but I think it's because of hypercorrection: so many vowels get dropped out in standard (NBC English) pronunciation that people striving to meet the prescriptivists' norms don't know where they belong. It's the same kind of stupidity that produces "between you and I", and that's largely historically responsible for the English verb form ending in -ing (such as "I'm beginning", versus "In the beginning").

A Mexican linguist whose lecture I once heard pointed out that the Mexicans he worked with in N. Mexico had a the soft drink called "Peksi", "Pepsi" to the rest of us. Apparently it was a standard change to make all /ks/ in that dialect into /ps/. They realized this was "substandard" and highlighted their perceived status as "rubes", and so carefully altered all their /ps/ pronunciations to /ks/. Hence, "Peksi."

In both cases, the reason was people who didn't have a specific feature in their language trying to adapt themselves to others' pronunciation in order to avoid rampant social, racial, or class prejudice.

...thanks for posting.

Jay Leno, who is from BOSTON, also mispronounces the word.

He's not Texan, no southern accent. How's that fit the accent argument?

(By the way, I'm one of those people who speaks "NBC English", or "prestige" English.)

Everyone over at Bartchat lost the ability to spell long before the press conference was over.

he can relate to his uneducated ignorant fundie base. It's a PR calculation like his fake "ranch" and Texas accent which he and KKKarl Rove no doubt have spent countless hours practicing to perfection.

It's a lie like everything is with G.W. (born in New Haven, Connecticut) Bush.