The Nerdish Accent

Anyone who knows me also knows that I'm a stickler for proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. This is an obsession of long standing, going all the way back to my childhood. As to its origin, I cannot truly say, except that, growing up, I used to spend a lot of time reading the copy of The Random House Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language that we kept in our living room. That tome, with its gilt title and thumb index, certainly played a role in my fascination with alphabets and writing systems, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if it likewise influenced my enduring love of language. Of course, a much simpler explanation is simply that I read a lot as a young person, like most nerds of my generation (or, come to think of it, the generations before mine). The books I read, especially the fiction, often included unusual, exotic, and highly specific words of the sort that Gary Gygax employed in his own writings. 

While my reading vocabulary was naturally enriched by the grandiloquent authors whom I favored, that didn't always translate directly into speech. It's one thing to know what a word means, but it's another thing entirely to know how it's pronounced. I can distinctly recall my youthful mispronunciation of the word "dilettante," for example, and it was far from the only example of where my literary precociousness had not given me a concomitant verbal acuity. If my own experiences are any guide, this was a fairly common occurrence. The "nerdish accent" is a highly individualized thing, but its one certain characteristic is that it reveals a person whose vocabulary, acquired through wide reading, is quite large but whose ability to pronounce much of that vocabulary is quite limited, owing to his never having heard the words spoken by another human being. 

My friends and I would often argue with one another about the way that some obscure word used in Dungeons & Dragons was pronounced, like dais or grimoire or guisarme (not to mention made-up words of the sort that appeared in the Monster Manual). This would inevitably lead us to a dictionary to determine the truth of the matter, assuming that the word wasn't too obscure to be found there. What's interesting is that, even to this day, I still regularly encounter nerds of my vintage who mispronounce words in this fashion. Though my inner pedant bristles at this, I simultaneously find it a charming reminder of my own younger days, when I, too, did not know the proper way to pronounce many of the words I read. 

The nerdish accent seems less common among those much younger than myself. Instead, what I notice is a rather different phenomenon: the inability to properly spell a word that one has only ever heard spoken by others. On those occasions when I look at forums, for instance, I regularly see the most bizarre misspellings, like "persay" for "per se," which suggests to me that audio and video are now much more important in the transmission of knowledge than they were in my day. A nerd of the past would have been much more likely to mispronounce that Latin phrase (as "per see" perhaps) than to misspell it. Nowadays, it seems like it's the spelling that's the source of error, not the pronunciation.

I suppose this shift – if indeed it is a shift – points to the influence of the Internet. Personal computers barely existed in my own childhood and the Internet wouldn't become widely accessible, let alone a driver of popular culture, for decades after my own fascination with language began. Books were the only means I had to learn about most topics of interest to me. That's less the case now and I suspect any decline in the prevalence of the nerdish accent might reflect the weakening of the primacy of the book, though it's a complex issue and likely has many causes.