A first follow-up — there will be at least one more — to my 2/3 posting “The nuh-DEER” that reported on back-accented pronunciations of nadir ‘the lowest point in the fortunes of a person or organization’ (NOAD), based on what I heard as MSNBC went past me while I was working at my computer (but then was unable to find on the MSNBC site). Now, a bit of clarification.
Background from 2/3. From that posting:
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 …, 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.
…I turned to the record of dictionaries to see if this pronunciation had been reported there.
No.
… 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?
And, I add, who now uses this pronunciation, and in what contexts?
An actual interview. On videotape. That you can listen to (transcripts are, of course, useless, as are text searches on the net). A 2/2/25 MSNBC interview of Nikole Hannah-Jones by Ali Velshi, “Nikole Hannah-Jones: [47] came right ‘out of the gate’ with a racial agenda — not an economic one” (now available on the MSNBC site). The summary text from Hannah-Jones’s Instagram site:
In the decades following Reconstruction, the country experienced The Great Nadir — a period of racial retrenchment and violent enforcement of white power. America is at an inflection point, warns Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, and faces the risk of slipping into a second Nadir in race relations more than 140 years after the first, which lasted nearly four decades. “We can decide in this moment as Americans: are we going to enter another nadir, or are we going to push back against that and continue to pursue an egalitarian society?”
Now: throughout this interview, Velshi and Hannah-Jones use only back-accented pronunciations of nadir: /nǝdír/ and sometimes /nàdír/ (a variant I hadn’t reported on before).
My guess is that Velshi got back-accentuation from Hannah-Jones, in their meetings setting up the interview. The question is then where Hannah-Jones got it: from discussions of the (Great) Nadir by her colleagues; from some other set of speakers; or as an innovation of her own (a result, presumably, of her having encountered the word only in written texts and so having no idea how other English speakers pronounced it).
The question might well be unanswerable. We have no access to Hannah-Jones’s linguistic history, and like most people, she probably has no idea when she first encountered some pronunciation (or word or word usage or form or syntactic construction or whatever); also, her memory might not be accurate; and in any case it’s very difficult to get access to busy people, especially people of some professional celebrity; and few such people see any point in answering a linguist’s questions about how they use language (in fact, they are often fearful that they will be shamed, or even mocked, by a linguist’s investigations).
I’ve tried to surmount these difficulties by seeking reports (and if they exist, studies) of back-accented nadir, to get past this one particular case, but so far without any success. I don’t have the resources to investigate usage on this point, so I am again asking for help. And right now I have to end this posting, because falling barometric pressure has triggered extravagant lightning-strike pain in the damaged ulnar nerve of my right arm, and I have to stop typing.
Leave a Reply