4 ms·
A LOT of people in the nuclear industry pronounce it as 'nucular'. I'm a little horrified.
by HPsquared 2y ago
A LOT of people in the nuclear industry pronounce it as 'nucular'. I'm a little horrified.
- bena 2y agoThis may be wrong or apocryphal or a third thing: But I recall reading that this is a deliberate affect used by those who work with nuclear material. Partly as a shibboleth, partly as a means of making the word easier to say quickly. It came up because George W Bush would pronounce it “nucular” and that was given as the reason. All if my memory serves that is.
- HPsquared 2y agoIt would make sense as a different spelling and pronunciation I guess. Like "molecular" or "ocular" or "particular". Fits in better.
- blipvert 2y agoSimpson fans, surely, for obvious reasons. I’d bet that they love the foilage in fall, too.
- sjcsjc 2y agoSomeone has to say cromulent at this point
- freedomben 2y agoAlways remember, "A Noble Spririt Embiggens The Smallest Man."
- kazinator 2y agostd::embiggen is coming to C++28, as part of the implementation of explode semantics.
- crazygringo 2y agoYou can read all about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucular But it's not something to be horrified by; it's no different from how we commonly pronounce "February" without the first "r", or "government" without the "n", or "Wednesday" flipping the "dne" to "nd". What's even more interesting is that it's only in the context of weapons/energy. The same person will say "nuclear family" the way it's spelled. But in the weapons/energy context, it's just a natural re-use of the suffix in "moleCULAR", "oCULAR", "cirCULAR". Technically wrong in terms of its derivation, but it feels entirely natural to say, and requires less tongue movement. It's not due to a lack of education or anything. It's more like a regional dialect, where the region is nuclear weapons and energy.
- fvrghl 2y agoDo you pronounce it as Wed-nes-day? I've never heard it as anything but Wends-day, but maybe everyone else is wrong.
- crazygringo 2y agoNo, that's my point. That words can be pronounced very differently from their spelling.
- ithkuil 2y agoThat's the way I always heard it too and indeed it contains the consonant cluster "nd" (inverted from what's spelled)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]