Hoover and Mrs.
Hoover first met each other as students at Stanford. And then I asked an
ex-member of one of the Sororities and she said that at college one was
a good deal in love and a good deal out of it. The romance rarely
persisted into later life.
She pronounced romance with the accent on the first syllable, whereas
somewhere half-way across the Atlantic the accent passes to the second;
and why such illogical things should be is a mystery. The differences
can be very disconcerting, especially if one refuses to give way. I had
an experience to the point when talking with some one in Chicago and
wishing to answer carefully his question as to the conditions under
which the poor of our great cities live. These are, in my observation,
infinitely worse in England than in America. Indeed I hardly saw any
poor in America at all--not poverty as we understand it. But I could not
frame my reply because "squalor" (which we pronounce as though it rhymed
with "mollor") was the only fitting epithet and he had just used it
himself, pronouncing it in the American way--or at any rate in his
American way--with a long "a." So I turned the subject.
Neither nation has any monopoly of reasonableness in pronunciation. The
American way of saying "advertisement" is more sensible than ours of
saying "adver?tisment," since we say "advertise" too. But then, although
the Americans say "inquire," just as we do, they illogically put the
stress on the first syllable when they talk about an "in?quiry.
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