Two rather odd pronunciations to have gathered ground this year are of the words women and lieutenant. I think I heard Evan Davies say lootenant the other morning, though it might have been a stumble.
My husband does not like the pronunciation lootenant. He thinks it is an Americanism. It certainly is these days; the puzzle is how the f-sound got into it in the first place. The agreeable John Trevisa, a Gloucestershire vicar with connections with the Queen’s College, Oxford, mentions in his translation of Ranulf Higden’s history of the world that the Archbishop of Canterbury was lieutenant to the Pope, and the word is variously spelled in the manuscripts of his book leeftenaunt, lutenant or levetenaunt. That was in 1387, in the decade after the word is first recorded.
The speculation that people introduced the f-sound because they misread the u in lieutenant as a v is unfounded.
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