"Often" with a t?

John McIntyre has started a list of broadcasting language peeves, among them "Sounding the t in often." I've been interested in this one since my daughter, brought up as an OFF-en speaker, went to college at the University of Michigan and came back saying OFF-ten. I don't think it's a regional thing -- I grew up two hours south of Ann Arbor, and I don't remember OFF-ten even as a variant. It must have been something she picked up from friends.

That's why I was primed to notice when Ben Zimmer, in a public radio interview after he was named Safire's successor, said OFF-ten. Of all people, wouldn't he have a clue about the pronunciation shift? Well, no. "Funny, if you had asked me, I would've guessed I say OFF-en," he e-mailed. "Just goes to show how unreliable self-reflection is when it comes to phonetic matters." (And, of course, he might well say OFF-en 98 percent of the time; we all have variant pronunciations -- depending on circumstance, audience, whim -- for some words.)

He pointed me to a discussion at ADS-L, where posters had not been able to establish that OFF-ten was either a generational shift or a regional variant, though one noted that it was an old pronunciation:

The variation seems to go quite far back in history. The American Heritage Book of English Usage (1996) suggests that the /t/ was lost in the 15th century, but that "Because of the influence of spelling," often "is now commonly pronounced with the t." That would, as Robert suggests, make the t-full version a spelling pronunciation.

Naturally, the t version has been scorned as both an ignorant goof and a pretentious mannerism. "The bad odor of class-conscious affectation still clings to it," says Charles Harrington Elster in "The Big Book of Beastly Pronunciations." And it's true that OFF-ten deviates from the usual pattern of soften, listen, fasten, christen, etc.

But ever since I started reading similar criticisms of my native Ohio speech oddities, I've been wary of ascribing motives to people's pronunciations. I grew up with "mirror" pronounced MERE and grocery as GROSHERY. But my parents didn't use those pronunciations because they were uneducated; they used them because everyone did. And my Eastern friends who said VAHZ for vase and AHNT for aunt weren't being pretentious; they too were speaking the language they'd grown up with.

Pretentious pronunciation surely exists -- I sympathize with McIntyre's aversion to "Bach uttered as if the announcer suffered from catarrh, or a Spanish name pronounced as if the studio were in the foothills of Andaluthia." But I think that in general, we're much too eager to label people dimwits or social climbers on the basis of pronunciations they probably acquired in the usual way -- by imitating the people they talk to.

Well, before? Or well before?

From the Washington Post website, a headline:

U.S. weighed spy swap well before 'sleeper' agents were arrested

I wouldn't call this a crash blossom -- its ambiguity is too discreet for "crash," and either reading of it makes sense. Still, I parsed it wrong (I think) before I parsed it right. Did the US weigh the spy swap "well" -- thoroughly -- before making the arrests? No, I think the WaPo means that the US weighed the swap "well before" the arrests.

Since this sort of thing is both work and play for me, I don't mind having to think twice. But headline writers are supposed to make it easy for readers; so why the vagueness (and syntactical ambiguity) of  "well before"?

Well, on the jump we learn that the administration began considering a swap "as early as June 11" -- two weeks and two days before the arrests. So "weeks before" would have been technically accurate, but (having just made it into plural territory) would read as overstatement. "Well before" avoids that pitfall because (like the incredibly elastic journalistic "recently") it's a flexible term. To me, in the context of spies you've been watching for years, "well before" suggests months, perhaps years; but there's no rule that says "well before" can't mean "a couple of weeks before." And so it does, in this case. I think.

Foil fail: A hidden eggcorn?

I opened the new issue of New England Home magazine today and found a plug for some outdoor dining items:

"These ocean-smoothed-stone napkin rings are the perfect foil to that sudden gust of wind that can uproot an outdoor party. $42/SET OF FOUR"

Bravely hyphenated, unknown copy editor! But what does the word foil mean in this sentence? In fashion- and decor-speak, a foil is a complement. It's "one that by contrast underscores or enhances the distinctive characteristics of another," in AHD4's definition, via Wordnik. That foil, descended from Latin folium, leaf, has several senses related to contrast and reflection, including "a thin leaf of some metal placed under a precious stone to increase its brilliancy" (OED).

But "the perfect foil to that sudden gust of wind" suggests a different foil, the verb meaning "To prevent from being successful; thwart." This foil has a complicated history, but it is not related to the leafy foil; its noun form means "a defeat."

The shelter mag's "perfect foil" looks like a combination of the two senses -- it has the phrasing of the fashion cliche, but the meaning of the (obsolete?) noun foil. Is it a hidden eggcorn, like "stagger off this mortal coil" and similar variants that interpret "mortal coil" as the surface we tread? Or did an editor shorten an earlier version -- "these napkin rings are perfect for foiling that sudden gust of wind" -- to a more familiar phrase? (I've been an editor. It happens.)

I've never before seen "a perfect foil" meaning "a perfect foiler," but that doesn't mean it's not out there. Anyone have another example?

Obviating the need for usage anxiety

"I used the phrase obviate the need to," e-mailed Jacques W., and "my anal friends said that the phrase was redundant. I said that if a significant number of literate people use a construction, that makes it acceptable. And what say you?"

 Ordinarily I would endorse Jacques' reasoning, but in the case of obviate, there's no need to rely on the brute fact that usage makes the rule, not the other way around. The ban on "obviate the need" was wrongheaded and shortlived, usage history reveals.

The OED online defines the verb as "To meet and dispose of; to circumvent, do away with, remove (a difficulty, need, etc.); to prevent or avoid by anticipatory measures." The grammarian Alexander Bain used the disputed phrase in "A Higher English Grammar" (1891): "Certain pronouns also, as will presently be seen, obviate the necessity of repeating the great substitutes of the Noun in composition."
 
But in the 1950s and '60s, says MWDEU, usage gurus Theodore Bernstein and Wilson Follett "seem to have invented the notion that obviate can mean only 'make unnecessary,' not 'anticipate and prevent.' They may have arrived at this conclusion by focusing too narrowly on the second part of the definition in Webster's Second [Unabridged Dictionary]."

I haven't (yet) found these authors specifically banning "obviate the need"; the accusation of redundancy must have been made explicit by later, lesser authorities. As recently as 2001, it is explained (and dismissed) in a usage note in Microsoft's Encarta College Dictionary:

Because one of the meanings of obviate is "to make unnecessary," it is sometimes argued that obviate the need (or necessity) for is redundant. An older but still current meaning, however, is "to avoid an anticipated difficulty." In a sentence like Addressing these issues early can obviate any need for a joint resolution, the need can be perceived as a difficulty -- or early consideration can make the resolution unnecessary, in which case any need for is indeed redundant. There is little reason to prefer either interpretation to the other.

And Garner's Modern American Usage (2009) demolishes the objection: "In the sense 'to make unnecessary,' obviate often appears correctly in the phrase obviate the necessity of or need for. These phrases are not redundancies, for the true sense of obviate the necessity is 'to prevent the necessity (from arising),' hence to make unnecessary."

One more peeve you can cross off your list, assuming you've ever had the misfortune to encounter it.