Mind your language
`IT WOULD never do for your argu- ments to profess to be irrefragable,' wrote Cardinal Newman to Wilfrid Ward. No, indeed, but how do your pro- nounce irrefragable?
And how would you pronounce such common words as iconostasis, unneces- sarily, controversy, pejorative, apsidal, ice- cream, gibberish. I reckon the stress goes on the following syllables: 3, 2, 1, 1, 1, 2, and 1 (with a soft `g'; the only person I have heard say gibberish with a hard 'g' is Evelyn Waugh).
Where the accent comes in English words has long been a matter of social distinction. Ferdinand Mount reminds us of this in his excellent new novel, Umbrella (Heinemann), which concerns the life of Lord Aberdeen. In those days it mattered whether you said balcony with the stress on the first syllable (bad) or second (good).
The problem in discussing these mat- ters is that one may end up being as dull and obscure as poor old Fowler. Yet his observation that English is tending towards recessive accentation of polysyl- lables has some validity. Words tend to be stressed towards their beginning. Thus we now say contrary (noun) or demonstrate with the first syllable pro- nounced a bit louder than those that follow, when once upon a time the sec- ond syllable carried the stress.
So far so good, but some words have shifted in the opposite direction, as in the famous "Tis sweet and commend- able in thy nature, Hamlet,' where we would now put the stress on the second syllable of commendable, unless we were on stage.
The flux is considerable. My own pro- nunciation differs from some of the preferences given by the Concise Oxford Dictionary, such as contemplative, dissol- uble, doctrinal, peremptory (on all of which they prefer the first syllable); abdomen, albumen and remonstrate (on which they prefer the second). And how anyone could pronounce vertigo with the stress on any other than the first sylla- ble, I cannot conceive. It all seems very arbitrary.
Oh and irrefragable has the stress on the second syllable and a hard 'g', though this may need a little practice to effect.
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