i'll have potent potables for $20 please, art

Why is it that no one can pronounce the word “potable” correctly?

One of the panelists on Real Time with Bill Maher last night was talking about the infrastructure in Iraq and the difficulty of getting drinking water available to everyone and mispronounced the word. She pronounced it with the short vowel sound as in pot, rather than the long vowel sound as in potent.

Perhaps you remember me bitching about the mispronunciation of this word in the far distant past.

http://jimboandhisfriends.blogspot.com/2005/02/rose-by-any-other-name.html

“What is the big deal?” many of you are asking. “The important part is that we know what the word means, and that we understand the necessity of potable water to survival.”

Someday, in a dynamic language like our own, the short vowel mispronunciation will probably become acceptable and old fossils like myself who pronounce it right will probably be considered—well, fossils. We’ll be considered a relic of some past civilization that doesn’t exist anymore—dinosaurs who clung to the old pronunciation and were rendered extinct because of our inability to adapt.

Someday in the distant future, archeologists will dig up my remains and date me by the configuration of my jawbone.

“You can tell,” one will speculate, “that this ancient being was from the early 21st century, and his mouth likely pronounced the word “potable” with the long vowel sound.”

“Yes,” replies his associate. “And he probably couldn’t levitate, either.”

“He surely held onto his dated ways and beliefs and was relegated to the dust of history.”

“Yeah. What a toad.”

This chilling tale of our distant future could likely come to pass a long time from now in Jimbo’s world.