A Prestigious Pet Peeve

When I was around twelve years old I was reading something aloud when my sister, Barbara, corrected my pronunciation of the word "prestigious."  I had pronounced the "i" in the middle as a long "e", and she told me that it should be pronounced as a short "i".  From then on I pronounced it "correctly", and for many, many years it would actually hurt my ears when I heard someone say "pres-TEE-jus", especially if it was a news anchor.  (Well, actually, it still does!)

Yes, in the root word, "prestige", the "i" is pronounced as a long-e, but then most people pronounce that word wrong, too.  It should be "pres-TEEZH", not "pres-TEEDG", which is how I hear most people pronounce it.  That second syllable should be pronounced softly, not with a hard "dg" sound. 

Well, anyway, I finally looked up "prestigious" one day, and although the short-i pronunciation -- "pres-TIH-jus" was listed in the dictionary as the first pronunciation, meaning it was the more acceptable, the long-e pronunciation was also acceptable.

In recent years I have consulted various dictionaries, and sometimes one pronunciation is listed first, while at other times the other pronunciation is listed first.  I'm sure that whatever dictionary Barbara had read -- and I do mean "read", because she used to sit around and literally "read" a dictionary -- must have only shown the short-i pronunciation as correct, because she was always very sure about such things.

The damage was done, though, as far as I was concerned.  I prefer the short-i pronunciation and wince when I hear it pronounced otherwise.

The word comes from the Latin praestigiosus, from praestigiae, and I believe that the first "i" in both those words is a short-i. 

Does anyone else even care about how the word is pronounced? (lol)  Is there another word that makes you wince when you hear it mispronounced (or not pronounced the way you like to hear it?)?  I used to work with a girl who hated to hear someone say error as "air-or".  She said it was like chalk scraping on a blackboard, and she preferred it to be pronounced "air-er", whereas I can't even think it as "air-er"!  {shudder!}

Tags: Prestige, Prestigious, Error