MJ - Is it Bury or Berry?????

[cellboy]

When in elementary school, my PE teacher was also an English teacher (this contradicts the old saying, "Those that can't do teach. And those that can't teach, teach PE?")

Anyway, his pet peeve, which came up often in class, was with the word Bury, and how most of the nation pronounced it.

"It is not pronounced Berry, as in strawberry. It is pronounced Bury (burrrr-rie)", he would say.

So as I watch the news about the many people that have passed, the word "Berry" is constantly used (which annoys me). And every time it is used I think of him and the word bury vs berry. Are going to bury (burrr-ie) him in the ground, or Berry him, in jam?

So who is correct?

Comments

[grizzlyzone.livejournal.com]

We are.

There are all sorts of regional differences in pronunciation. People who INSIST that everyone on the planet adopt the linguistic "party line", well, see userpic.

[(Anonymous)]

do we have too much time on our hands?

[cellboy.livejournal.com]

Thank you David! Have a nice day! :)

[danielefton.livejournal.com]

I've always heard it 'berry' if you make it past tense buried, 'burr-ied' makes me think of spurs or seeds that have spines.

also, here in KY it tends to have more of a 'barry' sound.

I always enjoy seeing answers to/discussion surrounding questions like this.

[jeremytblack.livejournal.com]

This is the old "descriptivist" vs. "prescriptivist" argument. Correct usage changes. Real speech is real speech and all words change and evolve. If 99% of the people are pronouncing a word a certain way, it's time for the prescriptivists to go ahead and pop that gasket in the head, have the stroke, and die because... Really? That's what you're going to be upset about?

Did you know the word "ain't", which is a word since it's been used in real language for hundreds of years, was a word before the contraction "isn't" ever came into existence? The difference is class. Lower class people used (and use) "ain't," so the people-who-will-have-strokes-early determined, from a state of denial, that it "ain't" a word.

[cellboy.livejournal.com]

Ah! Now that is interesting. Thanks!

[urbear]

Language is a living thing. It changes over time, and what was incorrect yesterday may be correct today.

Unlike some languages (like French, for instance), English has no central authority that claims that it's the sole arbiter of what is and isn't right. If a large fraction of the population pronounces the word as "berry", that's as good a reason as any to say that it's correct.