L'error
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In our discussion of part III of Elle Cordova's Grammarian Saga, "Grammarian vs Errorist showdown at the secret L'error", there was some back-and-forth about whether or not error could stand it for the nucleus of lair.
AntC wrote "I can't smudge 'error; into a single syllable", and I responded that "Elle Cordova does it by brute force — I don't think 'air' is her normal pronunciation of 'error'".
But looking into pronunciations of error on the internet, I've found that her "l'error" ~ "lair" pun is, in fact, pretty plausible.
In a 2012 story on Morning Edition, "Court Rules Against Part of Marriage Act", Dale Showengerdt says
And I think that was a significant legal error, and- and one
that we anticipate the Supreme Court will remedy.
Because the final /l/ of legal bleeds into the start of error, excising error's audio actually yields something that can pass for lair:
In the 10 random examples that I checked, error sounded effectively monosyllabic (i.e. similar to air) about half the time, which is consistent with comments by Roger C and Bob Ladd.
Biased said,
November 21, 2025 @ 2:14 pm
Agreed. I think the way the word would be pronounced with a French accent puts it even closer
Jarek Weckwerth said,
November 21, 2025 @ 3:28 pm
@ Mark Liberman Isn't it the case that AntC is non-rhotic? That would make a monosyllabic pronunciation quite unlikely.
Y said,
November 21, 2025 @ 3:57 pm
Cf. tourist-terrorist homophony.
kormac said,
November 21, 2025 @ 4:55 pm
I think people are going the wrong way with this. Instead of making "error" monosyllabic, in my head I hear "lair" as "lai-r", two syllables, so "l'er-ror" and "lai-r" are pretty close.
J.W. Brewer said,
November 21, 2025 @ 5:13 pm
When I was in 11th grade, we had a new teacher for the countywide accelerated math program who had a new-to-me pronunciation of "error." Not only as a monosyllable, but with an unexpected-to-me vowel, something like /ɜɹ/. It feels in hindsight like it took me several weeks to figure out that "error" was the word he was uttering and realize that his sentences made sense if interpreted on that basis. As a 16-year-old who was supposedly ready for eigenvectors and Laplace transforms and whatnot but was in fact rapidly losing focus on accelerated math due to the various more interesting distractions then available to 16-year-olds, this non-transparent pronunciation was especially unhelpful.
I don't know whether this was some sort of recognized regionalism I had not previously come across or a sheer individual idiosyncrasy.
Joe said,
November 21, 2025 @ 6:17 pm
I don't have any problem with using the lazy pronunciation for the pun. I just don't get the combination of the French "L'" with the English "error". The French word is "erreur".
Jonathan Smith said,
November 21, 2025 @ 6:44 pm
Cf. mirror, fire, etc… some of which have appeared here before. Where many Americans represent these as one syllable, I would be pretty surprised if a significant number do the same with error… but to be sure(r), you would have to get more directly to representations via scansion or word games or the like. Cuz e.g. everyone in the house can be saying "mirror" every day and still have no idea others have modeled it as having the "wrong" number of syllables…
Chris Button said,
November 21, 2025 @ 10:22 pm
It sounds to me like it's time to start counting those moraic atoms underlying those syllabic mollecules. At least then we wouldn't get all those English "haikus" that totally butcher the 5-7-5 moraic count.
@ Jarek Weckwerth
Yeah, that sounds like a pretty solid guess about AntC's accent!
AntC said,
November 22, 2025 @ 6:21 am
mea culpa, AntC is non-rhotic (Southern BrE with Yorkshire and NZ tendencies). So equally
@kormac in my head I hear "lair" as "lai-r", two syllables,
?Like a spelling pronunciation of 'layer'.
I couldn't do that: /lɛə/ has no /ɹ/ at the end.
et puis c'est l'heure du thé, chin-chin.
Philip Taylor said,
November 22, 2025 @ 8:14 am
Toodle-pip, old chap.
Andrew Taylor said,
November 22, 2025 @ 9:04 am
As a UK speaker I sometimes get confused by the (a?) US pronunciation of "era", which sounds to me like my (non-rhotic) pronunciation of "error". (I say "era" as "ee-ruh".)
Gabriel Holbrow said,
November 22, 2025 @ 10:42 am
Thanks for Professor Liberman for being some data to the discussion.
To add some more anecdotes, I am pretty sure that in my native pronunciation (formative years were in northern California) "error" is identical to "air". I am not certain, though, because my current pronunciation of "error" is buried under so many layers of education, conscious correction, and hypercorrection.
I tried out my two children (formative years in southern Indiana) by engaging them in a fake-spontaneous conversation about errors in baseball. What I heard from both of them sounded very similar to "air" but with a longer duration of the final /r/. I then told them what was up, and they said they subjectively thought of "error" and "air" as having different pronunciations.
I was not able to get audio recordings, sadly.
Mark Liberman said,
November 22, 2025 @ 11:41 am
@Gabriel Holbrow:
My guess is that for you as a child, and your children now, the pronunciations of "error" and "air" are what sociolinguists call a near merger — distributions of pronunciations that overlap but remain statistically distinct, and usually can be more clearly separated in facultative pronunciation where the speaker wants to make the distinction clear.
David Marjanović said,
November 22, 2025 @ 2:07 pm
G. W. Bush famously solved this problem by dissimilation, turning his "War on Terror" into "Warren Terra" in an otherwise rhotic accent.
Doomed to fail, I think. English just isn't mora-counting.
(German likewise, so it took me ages to grasp how mora-counting verse, e.g. hexameter, works in the Latin I had been taught for six years.)
Rodger C said,
November 23, 2025 @ 10:36 am
English just isn't mora-counting.
(German likewise, so it took me ages to grasp how mora-counting verse, e.g. hexameter, works in the Latin I had been taught for six years.)
Same here. I find it helps to play air guitar.
Rodger C said,
November 25, 2025 @ 11:00 am
Or air lyre …
Rodger C said,
November 27, 2025 @ 10:27 am
Air kithara, dammit. (Common origin with 'guitar'?)
ajay said,
November 28, 2025 @ 8:38 am
G. W. Bush famously solved this problem by dissimilation, turning his "War on Terror" into "Warren Terra" in an otherwise rhotic accent.
Hence jokes about airline security being part of the War on Tourism (I think first in the Onion).
The intro voiceover to the 80s series "Quantum Leap" had Dr Sam Beckett "facing mere images that were not his own" – or so I thought, before realising that it was "mirror images".
David Marjanović said,
December 3, 2025 @ 8:22 pm
That's kind of the opposite – between vowels this dissimilation strategy is not available, so Bush went for contraction: terrrism, terrrists