‘I can’t abide stigmata,’ said my husband, not through aversion to St Francis of Assisi, but by way of joining in this week’s craze, provoked by the BBC, of nominating a pet hatred among pronunciations.
‘I can’t abide stigmata,’ said my husband, not through aversion to St Francis of Assisi, but by way of joining in this week’s craze, provoked by the BBC, of nominating a pet hatred among pronunciations. My husband hates stigmata with the second syllable stressed, as in tomato.
It’s STIGm’ta for him, just as stomata is STOm’ta and anathemata (like David Jones’s) is ana-THEE-mata. As for anathema maranatha, a phrase from the First Epistle to the Corinthians (16:22), who can say? The Oxford English Dictionary says maranatha is pronounced mara-NAY-tha but ought to be m’RAN-atha. The word belatedly changed meaning, being taken for centuries as an intensifier of anathema, as if ‘the highest degree of excommunication’.
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