Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
HYPERFOREIGNISMS
is the Merriam editors’ name for our frequent bad imitations of foreign language pronunciations. The best advice is to avoid practicing in public those foreign pronunciations you haven’t truly mastered. When you get them wrong, the knowing snicker. Lingerie, like many other French words we’ve borrowed as elegant names for mundane things, has become common in English, and apparently because it seems somehow classier than does women’s underwear, we often try to keep it French-sounding, never really Americanizing it, but never really learning the French way of saying it, either. Alas, the usual two-syllable French LANZH-REE, with a nasalized first vowel, comes in many American variants, the most common of which is probably the three-syllable LAWN-zhuh-RAI. We could learn from our more sensible treatment of the equally French word brassiere: we rarely spell it with the grave accent in English these days, and we no longer even attempt a French pronunciation, except for keeping the stress on the final syllable: we say bruh-ZEER, or else we dodge the issue and clip the word to bra, pronounced BRAH. An unabashedly American pronunciation is always preferable to a fake foreign one. Avoid hyperforeignisms. See COUP DE GRACE.
