It’s a stirring moment. The president is rallying the nation, speaking of weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, good and evil. You watch, silently cheering him on, and then, suddenly, you sense it coming. You hope he won’t, but you know he will–no! no! please don’t!–and then he says it.
“Nucular.”
And there you are, wondering once again, why did he have to do that?
President Bush is not alone, of course. Eisenhower, Ford and Clinton all warped the word. Jimmy Carter, trained as a nuclear engineer no less, mispronounced his way into the collective memory years ago.
By and large, spoken language might deserve a margin of error. Mistakes are even part of what makes it sound alive. And for words like “mischievous” (“mischiev-i-ous”) or “library” (“liberry”), should we really care? But “nuclear” describes weapons engineered to kill millions and so deserves special handling.
Experts say “nuclear” wreaks so much phonological havoc because it takes serious acrobatics for the tongue to navigate the radically different sounds at the word’s core. And when one person errs, that can set off a “nucular” chain reaction, with others copying the mistake.
