Ms. Mentor

Mispronunciation or Manipulation?

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Question (from "Professor Stickler"): "Dean Titan," a very senior administrator at our Picturesque U., insists on pronouncing "collegial" with a hard "G" in every one of his impassioned perorations to our faculty. That has led to a bitter division among the faculty, with the more sycophantic members following his pronunciation while the rest of us bravely resist. Who is right, and do you have any suggestions?

Answer: Ms. Mentor often receives letters like yours, from the victims of academic malefactors. But she never hears from the perpetrators. She would dearly love to know why they commit their harassments, their whispered vilifications, their butcheries of the English language. She wishes the offenders would explain their crimes. She seeks only to understand.

She also marvels at the will to power among academics. After all, they've chosen a profession that will prevent their ever getting most worldly recognitions -- such as piles of money or fabulous cars, or tabloid-worthy flings with beautiful people of low intellect. Academics ought to get satisfaction from sharing ideas and opening the minds of the young to truth and beauty. Many do.

But others seek power, or at least individuality, by fomenting rebellions, being ridiculously chic, or interpreting others' utterances as highly meaningful and probably malevolent.

Which brings Ms. Mentor to Professor Stickler's question. How is "collegiality" pronounced, and should the dispute produce rival factions who hiss at each other?

In American English, the preferred pronunciation is indeed "coll-eej-al," but it is linked both to soft-G "college" and to hard-G "colleague." Certainly loyal Latinists who have never accepted English as the world's lingua franca might dig in their heels for a hard G. (And yes, Ms. Mentor knows that ecclesiastical Latin varies, and she hopes to receive epistles -- preferably in perfect Latin -- on this very subject.)

There are also British speakers who prefer "collegial" with a hard G as an assertion of imperial privilege and differentiation from rude colonial Americans. In a similar vein, British scientists speak of amino acids as "am-eye-no," a word Americans pronounce as "a-mee-no."

In short, Dean Titan may merely be a harmless Anglophile. But that would be far too dull an explanation for Professor Stickler and his ilk. There must be a better reason! There must be Meaning! There must be a reason to take up sides!

After all, taking sides puts everyone in a category, and academics love to categorize. Whole subject areas are built on classifying, polarizing, separating, labeling, and dating. Subtle and unsubtle distinctions are the bread of life. If you are not a Platonist, perhaps you're a Freudian, a Marxist, a Whig, or a dendrophile.

But Professor Stickler's cohorts seem to have reduced it all to one question: Are you Dean Titan's toady?

"My natural instinct is to toady," said Isadora, Erica Jong's scholarly heroine, some 30 years ago in Fear of Flying -- and souls more cynical than Ms. Mentor have applied that label to those who make it in the ivory-tower world. Indeed, academicians often have a history of conformity. They were the ones who followed orders, memorized the Periodic Table, did their homework on time, and even headed their papers correctly. They just need to be told who's the head toad, and a-toadying they will go.

Dean Titan clearly is the head toad. But Professor Stickler and his gang want to express their independence of spirit, their refusal to knuckle under to power. They will rebel. They will soar. They will pronounce "collegial" as if it had a J.

Ms. Mentor confesses that she cannot get excited about their feud. She is far more engaged by the feud between the Big-Endians and the Small-Endians in Gulliver's Travels, for it at least concerns food and major consequences: Some 11,000 people "suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end."

Yet that does not strike Ms. Mentor as a cause worth dying for, and even today, faced with an egg, Ms. Mentor can never remember which end should be up. She is glad that Jonathan Swift was a satirist, not a journalist.

Ms. Mentor also cannot resist mentioning that Swift himself was (yes) a dean -- of St. Patrick's Cathedral, in Dublin, back when deans had some serious social prestige. But Swift was also Irish, and therefore always an outsider, seen as something of a savage among the English intellectual classes.

Which brings Ms. Mentor back to Dean Titan and his uncommon pronunciation of "collegial." Perhaps, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, or Swift among the British, he simply doesn't know the local rules. Maybe Dean Titan simply doesn't know how to pronounce the word correctly. Perhaps he's more to be pitied than snickered at.

Most academics do possess a barn full of passive vocabulary, words that no one but Ms. Mentor can pronounce with complete authority. Among her favorites are "behemoth," "scion," and "menarche," but she also likes "boustrophedontic" and "pinguid."

Ideally, teachers who advise and mold the young will look up those words and pronounce them correctly in public. But sometimes in the heat of the moment, while passionately lecturing, even the most staid may throw caution to the winds and mentally revise what Humpty Dumpty says in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less. ... The question is which is to be master -- that's all."

Perhaps Dean Titan knows exactly what he's doing: Words are pronounced the way I pronounce them, because I Am the Head Nabob in Charge. And that is what it comes down to: Who is master?

Being "collegial" is important. Being liked can determine your academic future. And so, while Ms. Mentor knows you would like her to say that you should stand on principle ... and pronounce the word correctly ... and devil take the consequences ... she, in fact, will offer you this advice: If you don't have tenure, pronounce the word "collegial" just the way Dean Titan does. If you do have tenure, pronounce the word however you please.

Question: Does Ms. Mentor prefer to hear from the saintly and self-sacrificing, or from the vainglorious and degenerate -- or is that a silly question?

Answer: Yes.

SAGE READERS: Ms. Mentor thanks the many readers who inquired about her health after the attacks by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Ms. Mentor's battered ivory tower still stands on the Gulf Coast, but she is heartsick and knows what it means to miss New Orleans.

As always, Ms. Mentor welcomes queries, gossip, and rants. Anonymity is guaranteed. Ms. Mentor rarely answers letters personally, but many eager and troubled readers have found answers in her archive and in her tome, Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia.