SamQ aka Ah! Q! wrote:As a survivor of Junior Latin, I find it intolerable that the proper Latin and Greek endings are so mis-pronounced. "Funjai" being a particularly irksome lingual laziness. As for "a criteria", well it tempts me to fracture the sixth commandment.
Criteria is clearly the plural and I've always taken criterium to be the singular (I have no Latin). What then does "criterion" mean? The ending looks Greek but I have no Greek either.
To get back to the YouTube ... try to think of a mild term ... ah yes, moron, here's an example of what his problem is. Consider this famous quote:
Now is the winter of our discontent made summer by this bright sun of York.
In terms of where you put the emphasis, it's a thespian's playground. Try it yourself and see which words you instinctively stress (and I stress "instinctively" as opposed to thought out).
My version is:
Now is the
winter of our
discontent made
summer by this
bright sun of York.
If I did the thought out version, I can see another couple of possibilites. For instance, I might want to stress "sun". (I also noticed that I stressed only the "tent" bit of discontent.)
Let's consider our internet boy. Because he seems to have great problems turning language which goes in through the eyes into something which comes out of the mouth in a half normal way, I wouldn't be surprised at something like:
Now
is the winter of our discontent
made summer by
this bright sun of York.
That sentence alone is a stress mangler's dream. I daren't think what he might have made of one of Churchill's more rousing wartime speeches. In fact, I can't bring myself to consider it.