How to pronounce "etc"

[dr froyd]

this is a petty little thing but it's driving me f*ckin nuts

so many people - even educated people and scholars - pronounce etc as "exetera". If they had bothered to look up what "etc" stand for, it's "et cetera". It's latin, "et" meaning "and", and cetera meaning "the rest". Pronouncing it as "exetera" is just dumb.. it's wrong, it's ignorant, and makes me lose respect for people. It gives me the impression that people use words without even knowing what they mean, which means i cannot trust what they are saying

just had to get that off my chest

 

[Hadoblado]

Dunno why donya arks 'em

 

[Bluehalite]

I've never heard it said that way. Oh, wait, yes, I have. I have a similar peeve about the ING sound. Its not MAY keen. Its MAY KING.
I think Midwesterners or Michiganites tend to mispronounce it as EEN. I have a hard time not saying something to them.

Oh, and some things Southerners do to words can be irksome. They don't say push the button, they say mash the button.
One educated lady accountant I worked with said physical year end instead of fiscal year end. How can you go to school for 4 years as an accountant and still think its pronounced physical? Ugh.

 

[ZenRaiden]

@dr froyd if you want to have more pet peeves, and want to feel superior to ordinary plebs just study latin and greek.
Linguistically people are morons.
This is because until lately we had latin as part of living education, but now its been replaced with lesser education of languages.
This means that huge amount of stuff is still latin as legacy, but most people dont know latin.
Latin btw is extremely easy language to learn, albeit its hard to find good source material to learn from, because its been decades since people studied in en mass.
Another language worth learning is french. So many words are french in english lol.

 

[dr froyd]

yea latin would be great, i suspect the world make a lot more sense knowing it

i enjoy looking up the meaning and etymology of words, because im terrible at rote memorization so when there's actually a logical system behind things it's nice

im not even a language/grammar snob, but that et cetera thing annoys the hell out of me. It's more that i feel people want to use a fancy word like "et cetera" instead of just saying "and so on" or whatever, but they don't even know how to use the word so the mispronunciation reveals a certain ostentatiousness (how's that for a fancy word) and pretense

 

[fluffy]

This is how I always pronounced it:

ex - set - ter - rah

 

[dr froyd]

This is how I always pronounced it:

ex - set - ter - rah

right so where's the ex part come from

 

[dr froyd]

i suppose in latin one could say such a thing as "ex cetera" but this would have a different meaning - "ex" means from/out-of in latin

so if you say "cats, dogs, ex cetera" you are saying something to the effect of "cats, dogs coming out of the rest". Are these some sort of mutant cats and dogs being born from a creature called "the rest"?

 

[fluffy]

This is how I always pronounced it:

ex - set - ter - rah

right so where's the ex part come from

Not sure

Perhaps people conflated it with "extra" in the past.

 

[dr froyd]

@fluffy that makes sense

 

[dr froyd]

lol i just recalled a friend of mine who had heard the phrase "quote unquote" being said verbally and thought it sounded kinda cool, so he used it in writing, and he wrote "quote on quote". He didn't realize, of course, that "quote unquote" just means putting in quote symbols around words.

it's a bit of a similar scenario

 

[ZenRaiden]

I noticed the black community has habit of using axe instead of ask.

Probably its just habit.

Languages follow rules, but when rules are broken there is actually no one to impose them in real life.

Ain't no English teacher whopping anyone's ass for doing it wrong.

 

[Hadoblado]

It's a doggie dog world out there.

 

[dr froyd]

if i recall correctly, things like "axe" instead of "ask", "they was" instead of "they were" etc are things inherited from the slave owners of the antebellum southern states. These states were typically inhabited by lower-class scottish and irish settlers with poor (or at least different) grammar

 

[kuoka]

If you are a serious high brow intellectual you would want to say kai ta hetera (καὶ τὰ ἕτερα). Which is the original old Greek expression meaning "and the other things" that the barbarous Romans copied into et cetera. The same "hetera" that we use as a "hetero" prefix in modern english to mean "other".

I prefer "and so on" or "and the list goes on" when speaking, etc is good when writing, but I avoid it because it sounds a bit snobbish.

The et-se-trah way of saying et cetera is more efficient than saying et-se-te-rah. I would totally skip the "e" sound and merge se-te-rah into se-trah. After all the whole purpose of saying "etc" is saving time, so we might as well save on one syllable.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Greek expression meaning "and the other things"

This is interesting.

I remember hearing somewhere that many people actually spoke Greek in upper elites, and Latin was really language of plebs. Like Cleopatra and Mark Antonius were speaking fluent Greek with each other.