‘Despite the headlines, 'mischeevious' is not considered standard English'

Telegraph

31-05-2025

'Mischievous'. It's a word that has come to define my week in quite unexpected ways, ever since I happened to answer a question from an audience member at the wonderful Hay Festival about changes to English that I find annoying.
I explained that one bugbear I have recently overcome was the increasing use of the pronunciation 'mischeevious', since I have come to see the rationale for the change and to acknowledge its place in a long history of sound shifts that, for a lexicographer at least, are interesting to observe. The result was a right linguistic foofaraw, thanks to many a mischievous headline claiming I now consider 'mischeevious' to be entirely acceptable. I'm hoping I can set the record a little straighter now.
The first thing to say is that a lexicographer's job is to chart the trajectory of words as they evolve. We are describers, not prescribers, of language, despite the understandable desire of many for some form of linguistic government. English has no equivalent to L'Académie française, a body that attempts to preside over the French language. English has always been an entirely democratic affair, subject to the will of the people, and it is inevitable that some of the changes it undergoes will prove irksome along the way.
The fact that many of us are messing with the sound of 'mischievous' is clearly one. Despite the headlines, it is most definitely not considered standard English: in fact Oxford's dictionary of contemporary English offers unusually firm guidelines as to its usage: 'Mischievous is a three-syllable word. It should not be pronounced with four syllables with the stress on the second syllable, as if it were spelled mischievious'.
Why, then, are we changing it? Is there any method to our madness? The answer involves a process that has informed linguistic evolution for centuries. In the case of 'mischievous', which comes from the Old French meschever, 'to come to an
unfortunate end', the '-ievous' ending of the adjective is coming under the influence of such words as 'devious'. In the same way, it is becoming rare these days to hear reports of 'grievous bodily harm': I have heard 'grievious bodily harm' at least three
times on news reports just this weekend.
This is far from the only example of changing pronunciation, as readers will know all too well. 'Pacifically' and 'nucular' are two other repeat offenders. In the case of the former, 'pacifically' (already in the dictionary meaning 'peacefully'; the Pacific Ocean is the 'Peaceful Ocean') is judged by some to be easier to say, while the shift to 'nucular' brings it closer to such words as 'molecular' and 'secular' – there are fewer common words in current English ending with '-lear', with the exception perhaps of 'cochlear'. In each of these cases, familiarity seems to the catalyst.
Similarly, it seems most people feel on 'tenderhooks' these days, rather than 'tenterhooks'. The latter were once a common feature in cloth-manufacturing districts, for they were wooden frames erected in rows in the open air on 'tenter-fields'. Wet cloth would be hooked onto them to be stretched after milling, allowing it dry evenly without shrinkage. Metaphorically, to be on tenterhooks is to be as taut, tense, and in suspense as the wool itself. Today, tenters are no longer a feature of our countryside, resulting in 'tenderhooks' being chosen for the job instead.
I of course regret the loss of the story behind such words, but the joy of etymology is digging beneath the surface to discover these treasures of the past.
Lest you feel your blood pressure rising already, there is some reassurance in the fact that such shifts are nothing new. If you've ever wondered what a Jerusalem artichoke has to do with Jerusalem, the answer is absolutely nothing: the name arose because English speakers in the 16th century struggled with the Italian word 'girasole', which means 'sunflower' (the Jerusalem artichoke is a heliotrope). It sounded a little like 'Jerusalem', so they plumped for that instead.
At the same time, 'asparagus' must have proved equally challenging, for English speakers some 400 years ago decided
to call it 'sparrowgrass' instead. The expression a 'forlorn hope' is a mangling of the Dutch 'verloren hoop', or 'lost troop', describing the vanguard of an army that fell in battle. It's hard to deny that there is poetry in our substitution.
Slips of the tongue and ear are more common than you might think. Such words as 'umpire', 'apron', 'adder', and 'nickname' are the direct result of mistaken assumptions, for they began respectively as a 'noumpere', a 'napron', and a 'nadder'. In each case the 'n' drifted over to the 'a', since when spoken out loud it was hard to tell which word the letter belonged to.
There are dozens more examples. 'Teeny' is an alteration of 'tiny', 'innards' is a take on 'inwards', 'manhandle' is a semi-logical riff on 'mangle', and 'tootsie' represents a child's delivery of 'footsie'. Other words that once wore their hearts on their sleeves have changed their sounds completely: a cupboard was pronounced with 'cup' and 'board' fully intact; only later did we decide it was a 'cubbard'. A 'ward-robe', or 'keeper of robes', is now more usually a 'war-drobe2. And let's not even start with a process known as 'haplology', where a word's syllable is swallowed entirely: who pronounces 'February' with the middle 'r' these days? You're more likely to hear 'probably' as 'probly', too, and a 'library' as a 'libry'.
Even our idioms have taken a strange turn over the centuries. Why does 'head over heels' describe being upended by love when this is our regular bodily position? The answer is that the original was 'heels over head', meaning to turn a somersault, but
at some point in the phrase's history the idiom was mistakenly (and fittingly) turned upside down.
None of these changes mean we should no longer care. The opposite, in fact, for having bugbears means we are passionate about our words and wish to protect their beauty and clarity. What's more, when we mangle them, we run the risk of distracting our audience, and losing our meaning in the process.
But it also feels important to know that language – and English in particular – has always been unpredictable and occasionally erratic, changing as its users wish it to, even if that is occasionally by mistake.
I'll finish with one request: please don't shoot the messenger. I'm beginning to realise that there is a reason why I am occasionally called a 'minefield' of information.