new cue lar

I remember back in the 2000 presidential election (Motto: "Whoever you elect, it's still a four-letter word") the big deal about Gore was his lack of a personality and the big deal about Bush was his lack of speaking ability. My joke at the time was that my problem is that I have Gore's personality and Bush's speaking ability.

On that topic, Bush has taken some flak for pronouncing the word nuclear wrong with some frequency. To me, this begs the question at what point is the incorrect usage correct. Since I was a kid I always pronounced the word the same as Bush does, though lately I have bowed to convention and pronounced it like it is spelled. It is not that I haven't known that the word is pronounced "new clear." It is that I think "new cue lar" just sounds cooler.

I am not alone. A lot of people besides me and Dubya have used this pronunciation, including Presidents Eisenhower, Carter, and Clinton. The editors for Merriam-Webster actually have a prewritten official letter that they send in response to people who write in to gripe that the dictionary dares to list this colloquial pronunciation as a common usage.

There are a lot of words in the English language that have multiple accepted pronunciations, so it confuses me why we care about specific mispronounciations and not others. Why are we willing to agree with Louis Armstrong about tomato and potato but not about nuclear? I say let's call the whole thing off, because I want to go back to pronouncing it the way I like.