{"id":17555,"date":"2018-08-07T09:06:42","date_gmt":"2018-08-07T16:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17555"},"modified":"2018-08-05T21:25:14","modified_gmt":"2018-08-06T04:25:14","slug":"stressing-the-wrong-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/08\/07\/stressing-the-wrong-word\/","title":{"rendered":"Stressing THE wrong word"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>I\u2019ve been watching a lot of <cite>Star Trek<\/cite> lately, and I\u2019ve noticed something that happens a lot:<\/p>\r\n<p>A character is supposed to refer to some science or tech thing, but they put primary stress on the wrong word of the phrase.<\/p>\r\n<p>For example, they might refer to the Omicron Theta star system, but they emphasis the word <i>system<\/i>: \u201cthe Omicron Theta <em>system<\/em>.\u201d Or they might refer to a stasis field as a \u201cstasis <em>field<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>(Let us set aside the <cite>Trek<\/cite> writers\u2019 habit of naming stars after two Greek letters. I assume that they heard star names like <i>Alpha Centauri<\/i> or <i>Omicron Ceti<\/i> but didn\u2019t know about the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bayer_designation\">Bayer designation<\/a> system, in which a star name consists of a Greek letter followed by the name of the constellation it\u2019s in. I\u2019m guessing that at some point some <cite>Trek<\/cite> writers thought <i>Okay, so star names consist of two Greek words, and the easiest Greek words to come up with are letters, so we can just string together pairs of Greek letters.<\/i>)<\/p>\r\n<p>The mis-emphasis throws me right out of the show. Every time I hear it, it reminds me that these are actors saying lines that they don\u2019t necessarily understand. And it happens a lot; I haven\u2019t been counting, but I would guess on average once every couple of episodes, in nearly all of the <cite>Trek<\/cite> series.<\/p>\r\n<p>I wish that at some point someone had told all of the <cite>Trek<\/cite> actors, \u201cThink about how you would say this phrase if it were an ordinary English phrase. Like if you\u2019re referring to a baseball field, you don\u2019t put extra stress on the word <i>field<\/i>. Or if you\u2019re referring to a betting system, you don\u2019t put extra stress on the word <i>system<\/i>. So even if some of this technobabble is nearly unsayable, try to say it as if your character considers it an ordinary phrase.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>(Yes, yes, you can come up with plenty of contexts in which one would put extra stress on those words. I\u2019m not saying that\u2019s never correct; I\u2019m saying that it\u2019s not usually correct, and it\u2019s not correct in the context of these <cite>Star Trek<\/cite> phrases.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pronunciation","category-sound"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17555"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17557,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17555\/revisions\/17557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}