A Word Please

June Casagrande People send me free books. And, frankly, I feel just terrible about it.

You see, the reason people send me free books is that I write this column. A few publishers of grammar- and language related books have me on their "send her one and maybe she'll write about it" lists. It's not an honor. Publishers are -- well, let's just say they can be a little promiscuous about this stuff. They print the copies on the cheap, pay a little postage and send out as many copies as possible. I'm just another notch on their media lists.

Cost to publisher: four=2 0or five bucks. Guilting the bejezus out of a poor columnist who now owns dozens of books she's never written about: priceless.

So it is with a mixture of pleasure and shame that I report that, today, I got in the mail from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt a copy of "100 Words Almost Everyone Mispronounces," by the editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries.

"Hey," I thought to myself. "That's something my readers might actually find interesting. I almost never mention pronunciation here even though I know from reader e-mails that a lot of people take an interest in the subject. And, hey, it's just a lucky coincidence that I got the book as deadline approached on a day when I happened to be fresh out of ideas.

So I jumped right in.

Almost immediately I remembered why so many people mispronounce so many words: Those little pronunciation marks in dictionaries are hard to digest. Of course, they're even harder to reproduce in a small-town newspaper column. Impossible, even. But, using the book's pronunciation key, I'll try to translate those little schwas, doo-dads and umlaut looking things into English or at least Juneglish.

We'll start with "niche," as in, "the niche I call my closet is too small to hold all these free books" or "writing about pronunciation is not my niche."

Like many English words and most in this book, niche has more than one accepted pronunciation. But the preferred pronunciation surprised me. It's not "neesh," as I've always said it. No, it rhymes with "hitch." Though ten bucks says I'll still be pronouncing it "neesh" a year from n ow. It just seems so much more French to me.

Here's a word whose spelling I've written about, though not it's pronunciation: "chaise longue." Notice it's not "lounge" but instead the French word for "long." And, according to "100 Words Almost Everyone Mispronounces," that's exactly how it's pronounced. The whole term is pronounced "shays long." In French, the word for chair, "chaise," rhymes with "fez." In America, we harden up the A, making it rhyme with "haze," the American Heritage editors note.

And, by the way, the preferred plural is "chaise longues." Yes, "chaises longues" is okay, but a little overkill.

I was afraid to look up "nuclear." But my fear was unfounded. The correct pronunciation is NOO-clee-ur. You can also say NYOO-clee-ur. But NEW-kyoo-lur is not listed. (Take that, Mr. President!)

For "almond," the preferred pronunciation includes no L, though you can include the sound if you like.

The editors' preferred pronunciation of "hovel" does not rhyme with "novel" but instead with "shovel." But, you guessed it, you can use either. "Pina colada" has a Y sound after the N. "Schism" is pronounced SKIZZ-em. "Mischievous" has just three syllables, none of them "EE." It's more like "MISS-chuhvus." "Primer" as different pronunciations for its different definitions. The stuff that goes under paint is pronounced PRIME-er. The little textbook is called a PRIM-er, which rhymes with slimmer.

"Guilt" isn't in the book at all. Which is fine with me, because, now that I've found in a free book some stuff of interest to my column readers, I'm through with guilt for a while.

-- June Casagrande is author of "Mortal Syntax: 101 Language Choices That Will Get You Clobbered by the Grammar Snobs -- Even If You're Right." She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.