My favourite English teacher would roll in her grave and my grandmother would tut-tut and shake her head.
‘Youse’ is now almost as prevalent in common usage as ‘you’ in Australia, apparently. It was considered uneducated and lazy in my formative years and, as neither Miss D’Arcy nor Nanna would have accepted such sloppy utterances in their presence, it still sets my teeth on edge.
Youse is accepted as the plural form of you even in the national word bible, the Macquarie Dictionary. It is listed as a pronoun and recognised as a colloquial, working-class feature of Australian English.
Youse is not alone in the proliferation of mispronunciation. ‘Anythink’ just won’t go away, and it is joined by ‘somethink’ and ‘nothink’.
People order ‘expressos’ and they ‘arks’ questions. Even the social climbers get caught out. One of my favourites is the pronunciation of Moet – that very special sparkling beverage. Brand names including Nike, Hermes, Adidas and Porsche regularly get their own articulation disfiguration.
Mispronunciation’s humorous cousin is the malapropism – the unintentional (and often comedic) misuse of a word by replacing it with a similar-sounding but incorrect one.
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Malapropism is named after a character in a 1775 five-act comedy called The Rivals. In it, Mrs Malaprop’s mangled attempts at sounding erudite prompt her to declare that a gentleman is “the very pineapple of politeness”.
TV characters Kath and Kim were notorious for their malapropisms, including this jewel: “I want to be effluent and practise serial monotony”.
Then-future prime minister Tony Abbott generated guffaws globally in response to his malapropism when, on the hustings of the 2013 election campaign, he said of sitting PM Kevin Rudd’s megalomania: “No one, however smart, however well-educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom”.
To my mind, it is also just a bit funny that mispronunciation and malapropism are words that are hard to say correctly.
As acclaimed University of Queensland grammar expert and academic Ros Petelin once wrote: “In Australia, mispronunciation is often said as ‘mispronounciation’. Although it is a noun, there’s no ‘noun’ in it”.
My Nanna and English teacher might offer a wry smile at that observation.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.
