I was listening to the news on the radio last week—the story was about Barack Obama’s denouncing comments by Rev. Jeremiah Wright—when suddenly the relative tranquility was shattered by a jarring, cacophonous noise that knocked me to the floor.
“Divissive and destructive,” Sen. Obama was saying.
I grabbed my head—I was sure it was going to explode. I thrashed about on the floor for a minute until the throbbing subsided. I crawled back to my chair and was just pulling myself into it when another blast rocked the room.
” . . . the old divissive politics of the past.”
I’m not sure how long I was out, but it was an hour before I stopped shaking.
Look. Shove bamboo shoots under my fingernails, pour pumpkin spice coffee down my throat, even make me sit through The English Patient again, but don’t—DON’T—make me listen to the man who would be president say “divissive.”
Okay, he didn’t actually misspell the word “divisive” while he was talking. But the syllables he spoke—di-VIHS-iv—can be spelled only one way: d-i-v-i-s-s-i-v-e.
Worse, Sen. Obama is not the only one doing this. I couldn’t tell you how many ostensibly intelligent people I’ve heard say the same thing in the last year. It is particularly prevalent on National Public Radio, where making up new pronunciations for ordinary words is something of a sport.
So let’s try something. This shouldn’t be necessary with an adult audience, but apparently it is.
Say these words:
Decisive.
Incisive.
Derisive.
Okay, ready?
Divisive.
Now, let’s mix it up a little:
Abrasive.
Adhesive.
Corrosive.
Intrusive.
Are you getting the long vowel sounds?
Now, we’ll change course.
Massive.
Expressive.
Permissive.
Do you see a pattern here? Do you notice that when there’s a double “s,” the preceding vowel is short, but when there’s a single “s,” the preceding vowel is long? So let’s try this one again:
Divisive. di-VYE-siv.
Is this difficult? Or is this something a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School ought to be able to figure out?
Here’s the thing. There actually are words in our language that are difficult to pronounce. February. Oeil-de-boeuf. Ophthalmologist. Bicenquinquagenary. But “divisive” is not among them.
It is true that approximately one in three dictionaries lists “di-VIHS-iv” as an alternative pronunciation for this word. That means enough people have mispronounced it consistently enough to get the attention of the editors. Not an excuse.
It turns out that there has been a fair amount of discussion on this subject—specifically about the way Sen. Obama pronounces the word—among the bloggers. One hypothesis is that the senator and his ilk think “di-VIHS-iv” sounds more erudite. It is unclear, however, how mispronouncing words demonstrates erudition. If you say “nucular,” the leading explanation is that you’re stupid. The same goes for “divissive.” (And, by the way, where is the evidence that Americans want an erudite president?)
Don’t get me wrong. I like Sen. Obama. I voted for him. And after listening to the recent panderings of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, I’m not about to change my mind. But why, oh why, must every candidate for every office turn out to have a fatal flaw?
Yes, I know, flaws come in different magnitudes. Mispronouncing a word, intentionally or not, doesn’t rise to the level of, say, having an affair with a White House intern, or making up phony intelligence as an excuse to start a war, or endorsing an idea like (for example) a “gas tax holiday” that you know is idiotic.
So I suppose that as long as our next president is decissive and incissive, and can do something to unitt our dividded nation, I can tolerate a few speaking gafes. But I won’t be hapy about it.
