For your edification:

[conuly]

The word is pom-pon. There's an N at the end.

Oh, and those apes? Are orangutans. They may drink tang, but it's not part of their name.

GET IT RIGHT!

Thank you. This has been a public service announcement.

Comments

Okay, I never saw a catalog for cheerleaderish things...

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I've never seen (actually never even considered the theoretical existence of) catalogs for cheerleaders before... I was just going off the spelling I saw in fiction books growing up in fiction books starring kids/teens, with "pom-pom" usually being in reference to cheerleaders. :) My guess is that it has been an alternate spelling for so long that published authors automatically used it for both concepts as well.

Re: Okay, I never saw a catalog for cheerleaderish things...

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

I was in HS way before online shopping. Although I wasn't a cheerleader in HS, I had seen the catalogues they ordered stuff from.

Wow, I just googled pom pons and the internet is chock fulla pom pons. (Including a site that said, yes, it's pom pons, no, we won't bother going into why it's an N. Huh?)

Re: Okay, I never saw a catalog for cheerleaderish things...

[conuly]

Because it's French, basically, and that's how the word is spelled. That's how I always understood it, anyway. There's not much to explain.

Re: Okay, I never saw a catalog for cheerleaderish things...

[rho]

Well gosh. I'm glad that all the other English words of French origin have retained their exact ancestral form.

Yes, I know I'm being facetious. I think that the interesting thing here isn't so much how the word is spelt, but the prescriptivist/descriptivist argument. I don't think that there are many people here who would deny that pompon was the original form, but that pom-pom is now widely used (over 4 times as many google hits for pom-pom as for pom-pon).

The question is, how long do we wait after a word has mutated before we accept the newer version as "correct"? Clearly we have to do so at some point, or we'd all be speaking proto-indo-european (or some earlier, unknown language). Equally clearly, we don't want to legitimise every single mistake that anyone ever makes. Somewhere in between the two extremes is a line to be drawn, and it isn't exactly clear where the line is, and it's one of those things that perfectly reasonable people can disagree on.

As you may surmise from my facetious opening, I tend to be of the descriptivist camp, and am perfectly happy to see pom-pom, et al. If a usage becomes more widespread tha the original, then I'll admit that it can be viewed as correct, even in cases when I don't like it (so for instance, I'm accepting of people using "less" when refering to countable items rather than "fewer" even though it drives me nuts).

(In this particular case, I'm also curious if it's a regional thing at all. I'm fairly sure that I've never seen "pom-pon" other than on the Internet. Though this may just be because it's not a particularly common word, no matter how you spell it. (I'd also say that I've never heard it either, but I'm not sure my hearing is good enough to discern that sort of minor difference, when context is leading me one way in particular.)

Re: Okay, I never saw a catalog for cheerleaderish things...

[conuly]

1. I'm a descriptivist. Most of the time. Spelling's not one of those areas, though... I figure that if spelling were meant to make sense, it would already, but as it doesn't, we ought to go whole-hog and stick with the original spellings of words.

Mostly because I'm miffed that nobody takes my diabolical plans to reform English spelling seriously.

2. *ignores most of the rest because I tend to agree*

Huh. I should show you my "insulted their religion" rant one day. I think you weren't on my friends list then. It was... a bit scary. Two people defriended me. One claimed that nobody has ever been judged unfavorably for speaking the standard (i.e. correct!) dialect instead of the local one. I'm still not sure what world she's living in.

3. In this particular case, I'm also curious if it's a regional thing at all.

Just a pedantic one. This? Is my childhood. Heaven forfend you ever say "If I was..."! You'd get yelled into the middle of next week! (Which I believe is the only explanation for my mastery of the English subjunctive. It's apparently a tense you can't use properly unless you grew up with a somewhat crazy intellectual snob or two.)

Re: Okay, I never saw a catalog for cheerleaderish things...

[wakasplat.livejournal.com]

1. I'm a descriptivist. Most of the time. Spelling's not one of those areas, though... I figure that if spelling were meant to make sense, it would already, but as it doesn't, we ought to go whole-hog and stick with the original spellings of words.

þæt makes sense... ;-)

Re: Okay, I never saw a catalog for cheerleaderish things...

[conuly]

Man, if only we could have a useful letter for th again....