Adding ‘th’ for no clear reason

JUNE CASAGRANDE

“Heighth” is not a word. Never has been. Never will be. So you can

imagine how baffling it is to sit in Newport Beach City Council

meetings twice a month and hear this non-word used over and over.

The word, of course, is “height.” There’s no “th” sound at the

end. And I’d bet just about anything that the addition of the “th”

sound at the end is merely a subtle mispronunciation by people who

know how to spell the word correctly.

Normally I just ignore it. But at a recent meeting I decided to

take note. Councilman Dick Nichols said “heighth” about a half dozen

times. Mayor Tod Ridgeway used it, too. Several other people did as

well, but I can’t remember who. During the entire meeting, I’m not

sure anyone pronounced it correctly.

It’s hardly a serious violation of the language. It’s just weird.

Another bizarre mispronunciation I hear on the dais is

“precedence.” Of course, “precedence” is a word. But people keep

using it in place of “precedent,” saying things like, “That sets a

bad precedence.”

The funny thing about that is that half the council members are

trained as lawyers. And in a city where it seems like half the

population are trained as lawyers, this, too, is a little weird.

The words have pretty different meanings, too. According to

Webster’s New World College Dictionary, a precedent is an act, legal

decision etc. that may serve as a justification for a later one.

“Precedence,” on the other hand, is basically a form of “precede.” It

means to come before or to outrank.

I try not to let little mistakes like this irk me, but it’s

difficult. It’s like a battle for my soul as the nice me remains

locked in a mortal full nelson with the nitpicky old bitty I could so

easily become. And the more I pay attention to people’s little

mispronunciations, the more I turn into the nitpicky bitty. Still,

it’s hard not to let her win, especially when I’m constantly barraged

with words like “supposably.”

Like the examples above, I’ve never once seen anyone write

“supposedly” wrong. In print, everyone gets it right. But more than

half the time I hear people pronouncing this word, they throw a B in

there for no reason at all: “supposably.”

One I’ve written about twice already is “a whole ‘nother,” which

people use to add emphasis to “another.” And I’ve also written about

people saying “I should have went,” which is incorrect, instead of,

“I should have gone.”

There are lots of times when I would argue that it’s better to say

things wrong. For example, you’ll never hear me say “Whom is your

favorite Backstreet Boy?”

But other times, say in televised City Council meetings, it’s a

good idea to know how to speak well. Of course, we shouldn’t be too

rough on city councilmen when the leader of the free world insists on

pronouncing nuclear as “nucular.”

George W. Bush certainly wasn’t the first to suffer from this

baffling inability to pronounce a simple word. But one would have

hoped that in the decades since comedians started seizing on this

mistake that our leaders would have figured it out. To paraphrase a

Dennis Miller joke from the late 1980s: I don’t think our leaders

should be allowed to make decisions on nuclear policy until they

figure out how to pronounce it.

* JUNE CASAGRANDE covers Newport Beach and John Wayne Airport. She

may be reached at (949) 574-4232 or by e-mail at

[email protected].