There Really Is A Flat Earth Society

[guohua]

I was watching John B. Wells' show earlier. He somehow got on the topic of Uranus and went off teaching everyone how to pronounce it too. He said people in the U.S. are the only ones who mispronounce it.
Now, here I see it again.

Weird.  


ETA: @"guohua" , where do you find all those crazy memes you post?  I really want to visit that place!  

Well, that particular professor was an American, too - from Wisconsin, got his Phd at Yale. At the same university, I also studied Ancient Greek, because there was a language requirement. I think, because of that particular course of study, that it originally was neither "Ur-A-nus" nor "URINE-ous" - I believe the original pronunciation was more like "Oo-RAHN-ose".

But that's just me, and my pronunciation likely wouldn't cause as many giggles in a crowded lecture hall, and so is not as entertaining.

.

They are act like Old Maids and Religious Zealots, worrying about pronouncing a word that is actually spelt UR-A-NUS Not YURR-EN-US 

Understand why the "Yurr-AY-nus" pronunciation of "Uranus" is sometimes considered vulgar.

• Break the word into three syllables: "Ur", "An", and "Us". Many people pronounce the "A" as "ay" or "ey (a long "A") and re-distribute the syllables as "Ur", "A", and "Nus". This makes the word sound uncannily like "Your anus"--which may be humorous to some people, and offensive to others.[2]
  
• The "Yurr-AY-nus" pronunciation may seem especially apt because Uranus is a gas giant, swirling with high concentrations of toxic methane.
  

[size]
Source of URANUS[/size]

We all grew up calling it “your anus,” so when did it morph into its more superficially respectable current state?


As early as 1920, the Oxford English Dictionary referred to it as, “you-ran-us,” like a proper English sentence.

But by 1980, Merriam-Webster had noted the slight shift to “YOOR-uh-nus” among both astronomers and those who worship Greek deities.
Somewhere between those two dates, we all picked up the habit of pronouncing it the dirty way regardless — probably because it was more fun, but also because it’s closer to a phonetic pronunciation of its spelling in American English.

The wider population (us dummies) took little heed of the dictionary change until the planet started hitting the news again once the space program picked up. As one commenter here describes it: “Uranus was changed to ‘URINE-us’ in 1986 (? — maybe ’85) when one of the space probes was preparing to do its fly-by.

Newscasters around the country realized that three weeks of ‘your-anus’ would never work, especially when also tossing in the reference to a ‘deep space probe.’”
It IS YOUR-AN-US