Does it matter when we lose battles as language changes? In Oxford the other day, I saw another piece of evidence that in the High Street has changed to on the High Street. A newsagent’s near Teddy Hall has for some time been called Honey’s of the High. It is now usually called Honey’s on the High.
I don’t much like the change, but it seems triumphant. A change of a different kind that triumphed two or three decades ago was in the pronunciation of sonorous. It is now stressed on the first syllable, and that indeed is how I say it. Formerly, it was stressed on the second syllable. I am not conscious of ever hearing it so pronounced now.
My husband, whose medical training had by the 1980s taken as much effect as it ever would, says that sonorous with the second syllable stressed was an established term in auscultation; your rhonchus (a word simply derived from the Greek for ‘snore’) could be sonorous or sibilant.
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