Caught out of the corner of my ear on 2/1 and 2/2, discussions on MSNBC (which might have been re-plays from earlier dates, I haven’t been able to tell) with Nikole Hannah-Jones (creator of The 1619 Project), about the Nadir, or Great Nadir, of American race relations. I’ve since looked up some information on the subject (see below), but what got my attention was the pronunciation of nadir — back-accented nuh-DEER /nǝdír/ or sometimes nay-DEER /nèdír/ — that everyone involved used all throughout these exchanges; it stood out like the proverbial sore thumb because, I’m sure, I’d never heard it before. It was totally bizarre.
In the dictionaries. I turned to the record of dictionaries to see if this pronunciation had been reported there.
No. American dictionaries (and the 2003-revised OED, for US English) give two variants, front-accented /nédìr/ and (like Ralph Nader) /nédǝr/, invariably my pronunciation; the OED gives only a front-accented (and non-rhotic) pronunciation for British English. Universally for the US and the UK: front accent.
On the other hand, clips of sample pronunciations available on-line are heavily in favor of back-accented /nèdír/ or /nǝdír/. The questions are, how long has this been going on, where did it start, and why?
I hoped that Ben Zimmer had noticed this pronunciation and written about it in one of his columns. But apparently not. So none of the (very limited) resources available to me shed any light on my questions, which I now throw out to my readers for illumination. (Please don’t write to tell me what an ignorant old fool I am, everybody knows so and so. I have already reported that I’m literally ignorant: I do not know. So I seek to find out.)
The Nadir. From Wikipedia:
The nadir of American race relations was the period in African-American history and the history of the United States from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the early 20th century, when racism in the country, and particularly anti-black racism, was more open and pronounced than it had ever been during any other period in the nation’s history. During this period, African Americans lost access to many of the civil rights which they had gained during Reconstruction. Anti-Black violence, lynchings, segregation, legalized racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy all increased. Asian Americans and Hispanic Americans were also not spared from such sentiments.
Historian Rayford Logan coined the phrase in his 1954 book The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901. Logan tried to determine the period when “the Negro’s status in American society” reached its lowest point. He argued for 1901 as its end, suggesting that race relations improved after that year; other historians, such as John Hope Franklin and Henry Arthur Callis, argued for dates as late as 1923.
Of course, Hannah-Jones wasn’t being interviewed about the Nadir just for its historical interest — it’s a wrenchingly dark story — but also for its relevance to the current American situation, in which we appear to be rapidly descending into a second nadir.
Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen
Nobody knows our sorrow
February 3, 2025 at 10:53 am |
Never in my 85 years have I heard it pronounced nay-DEER. Like its opposite zenith, it’s a loan from Classical Arabic astronomy into medieval Latin and from there to English. – Or is that to be zee-NITH now?
February 3, 2025 at 11:20 am |
I don’t need further voices saying that the front-accented version has been (so far as I can tell) the standard pronunciation throughout modern English; I expect almost everyone’s reaction to the back-accented version to be WHAT THE HELL? What I need is information on how that version has gained a firm foothold in some quarters.
February 3, 2025 at 5:14 pm |
My son is known to frequently pronounce words with emphasis on syllables that is non standard. He is well read, but hasn’t heard the word spoken to know where the emphasis should be.
February 3, 2025 at 5:43 pm |
Yes, this phenomenon — a mispronunciation of a word that you have encountered only in writing — is quite common in English; it probably has a name, though I don’t know it. But what I reported on in this posting is not just a person here or there making this error, but whole groups of speakers doing the same thing, with one another. (Of course it’s possible that the original error was of this sort, but that it was made by someone of considerable authority within a social group and so spread from that person.)
February 4, 2025 at 5:55 am |
On Facebook from Mike Pope:
My response: