Laura Bush is a former school teacher... why hasn't she taught W how to say "nuclear?"...IN 8 YEARS?

Just wondering....:shrug:

P.S...I'm adding this a little later....
My point is... wouldn't you think that with all the negativity directed towards him, from around the world, wouldn't it be preferable to at least pronounce such a much used word properly?...I mean just to perhaps spruce up his image a smidgeon?

:shrug:

:shrug:

It may be the one area where I'd have sympathy for them. :(

She doesn't have a hell of a lot to work with.

:shrug:

is not an easy thing to do. With all of Bush's faults, Laura may be picking bigger issues to address. There must be plenty.

That would not surprise me..

:eyes:

It's southern dialect. Yankees can't pawk caws and southerners can't use nucular paur.

I have no regional interests to defend with Carribou Barbie. :)

That's what bugged me.

I'm sure she has very few pleasures in that marriage.

I wish her well, and for the rest of her life... and I hope she dumps the asswad.

Like his twang. He knows better.

with his elbows cocked out nearly 90 degrees anymore. Dude doesn't even try to hide his phoniness, the mouthbreathers and media pundits are too smitten to care.

"Crik" when they see the word 'creek.'

I grew up on the central coast of California and where I come from we say creek with a long ee sound. Her they have substituted that for the short i sound.

When I'm speaking with people from Montana, I often forget to use the local pronunciation unless I focus on it. That's the nature of language. There really is no right or wrong way to say anything, no correct or incorrect way. There are just differences. Everywhere you go. And a language that is used widely is always changing.

Pronunciation is a hard thing to modify, especially in older people. Accent is the last thing to conquer in learning a foriegn language, and often it is never overcome.

Look at Ariana Huffington or Arnold S. for examples of fluent second language speakers/writers who still have an accent. I bet if they focus on the accent as they speak either could almost entirely remove it. But when they speak naturally and fluidly it always returns.

They can be told repeatedly about the proper local pronunciation and it just won't stick on a second nature level.

My guess is bush will always pronounce nuclear the way he does, but not because he's uneducated.

in a word.

Creek and crik (also common in the midwest) is just a bit of vowel drift, and is not at odds with the way the word is written.

Nucular and nuclear are as different as liberry and library. Educated people just don't say they are going to stop by the liberry on the way home. It is not simply dialect - it is READING the word incorrectly.

And bush says it that way because he is pandering to the uneducated.

made them separate languages. And the educated in those societies were all murdering Latin together and separately.

My point is that when someone is used to pronouncing a word in a certain way, they aren't likely to be able to unconsciously change pronunciation.

bush is dyslexic is my opinion. So is his dad. Which figures.

bananas in the world.

pronunciation of words takes a waaaay back seat.

around the WH. Not kidding, her gig for the last 4 years has been either keep W sober or hide the fact that he's not.

LBJ and Carter pronounced it "nukular," too. It seems like many English speakers have a problem with the k-l consonant cluster as it in "nuclear," our brains for some reason want to switch around the l and the e, and then turn the e into a reduced "schwa" vowel. Something similar, a process called "metathesis," is the cause of the mispronunciation of "ask" as "aks," a mispronunciation that, amazingly, goes back to Old English, where you kind the word written as either "Ascian" or "Acsian".

Sometimes teachers just give up when there is a hopeless case.