Pop Larkin from The Darling Buds of May won himself a place in the Oxford English Dictionary by saying things like: ‘Perfick wevver! You kids all right at the back there?’ So it was some surprise to find a couple of television advertisements mispronouncing perfect in quite a different way. They say the second syllable as though it were spelled fecked, as in the stressed syllable of effect. Perfect has a long and complicated history, and was never pronounced with the ‘c’ at all in the Middle Ages. The old pronunciation is preserved in the surname Parfitt (an occupational name, for an apprentice who was trained or perfect in his trade, as Chaucer’s knight was parfit in chivalry).
In the 16th century, the ‘c’ was introduced in spelling, as part of a trend to reclassicise words.
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