Machinations

Ian Hislop mocked Stephen Mangan, when he put in a turn as the man asking the questions on Have I Got News For You last week, for saying ‘masination’ (for machination), but Hislop himself used the unjustified modern pronunciation ‘mashination’. The version with ‘mash-’ is not known for sure until 1961, although a book published in 1931, The BBC’s Recommendations for Pronouncing Difficult Words (which I recommend to Mr Hislop) stipulates the traditional pronunciation (‘makination’). This suggests that people were already going wrong in those days. Pronouncing the first syllable as ‘mash’ came about through the influence of machine.

Most popular

Samuel Gregg

The welcome fall of Klaus Schwab

Pronouncing words that we have only seen in print is a problem for us all. I can understand people ignorantly pronouncing machismo as if it were a Scottish surname ‘MacIsmo’. I am less sure why they pronounce Che, the pet name of Ernesto Guevara, as if it were an abbreviation of Cher.

In politics, machinations are the daily work of Machiavellis. Most people have no trouble pronouncing this name, but it has only been spelled like that in English since 1849. Before then, the normal form was Machiavel. In The Spectator for 19 February 1712, Joseph Addison wrote of ‘young Machiavils’, but spellings with -tch- from his time suggest that the name was generally pronounced in three syllables as ‘match-ya-vil’. Machiavelli’s work had been printed in English in 1584, and from 1587 onwards people are recorded playing on the words match and evil.

Less common in the political world now are machicolations. It is forgivable to think that the first syllable of this obscure term (holes between corbels on a projecting castle parapet) is pronounced ‘mak’, though the correct version is ‘match’. A stable form of the word machicolated (deriving from the late Latin machicolamentum) only emerged in historical contexts from the 1780s onwards.