STRESSED OUT

posted by James Reel

    Last week, as co-master-of-ceremonies of the student chamber music showcase at the UA school of music, I spent some time backstage double-checking the pronunciations of performers’ names. One instrumentalist brightened and said, “I’m flattered someone would ask!” I imagine she’s gone through 16 years of schooling, her teachers always mispronouncing her last name because they’d never bothered to ask her how it should sound. It’s not a difficult name; the challenge is figuring out whether to accent it on the first or last syllable. Americans tend to shift accents to the beginnings of words, but that’s not where the stress should fall in that student’s name.
    I’d guess that stress is second only to vowel quality among things that tone-deaf speakers get wrong. Think about comedians affecting a French accent: Perhaps confused by all those accent marks over concluding Es, they tend to stress the last syllable of every word. In reality, French is pretty much a flat-stress language, except that a spoken French sentence builds momentum as it goes, and tends to end with a little punch. A rule of French stylistics is to conclude every sentence with a strong or important word, rather than letting it trail off; no doubt this ties in with the tendency to inflect the ends of spoken French sentences with extra weight.
    This brings me to something frustrating in my work as an editor and proofreader. One publisher I work with decreed several years ago that “back yard,” the noun, should be replaced by the more colloquial “backyard,” properly reserved for adjectival use. I’ve even seen this atrocity in the morning paper.
    Why is this such a bad thing? Let me count the ways. First, there’s the stress problem. Look at the word “backyard,” and your first inclination is to stress the first syllable. Which makes perfect sense if you’re saying “I have a backyard barbecue.” It makes no sense if you say “I have a barbecue in the backyard.” Preserving the noun form as two separate words keeps the stress in its proper place, and maintains a helpful visual distinction between the noun and adjective. Maybe those points count as “first” and “second.” So third, it’s inconsistent. We haven’t turned “frontyard” into a noun, and I’ve seen no indication that such a change is imminent. If we still use “front yard,” we need the parallel structure of “back yard.” (Same goes for backseat/back seat.)
    English vocabulary is rich in nuance and useful distinctions. Unnecessary streamlining, like nouning “backyard,” robs our language of that richness.