A Manual of Pronunciation: For Practical Use in Schools and Families

In the early 1900s, how you said a word could mark you as educated or common, refined or crude. Otis Ashmore's Manual of Pronunciation captures a moment when Americans were deeply anxious about speech, when elocution lessons were essential social currency and mispronouncing "either" or "enthusiasm" could quietly betray your background. This is less a dry reference work than a time capsule of linguistic anxiety, listing hundreds of words that Ashmore and his contemporaries heard mangled daily: "antagonize," "Atlantic," "avenue," "museum." Each entry provides the "correct" pronunciation as recognized by authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, framed as habits to be corrected before they calcify. For modern readers, the book functions as both historical curiosity and unexpected entertainment: you\'ll marvel at what once passed for acceptable speech, wince at the class anxieties embedded in every "r" that should or shouldn\'t be sounded, and perhaps wonder which of today\'s pronunciations will seem equally dated a century from now. Anyone curious about the history of language, education, or the social performance of "correctness" will find this surprisingly absorbing.