Today I learned +

[Aeson]

I can't pass the buck to him; I was already in my 40's by then.

Maybe it's a Southern thing? I was in my 30s when it was pointed out that I did it. I never paid attention to it.

 

[Aeson]

TIL that in the early days of baseball the pitcher would pitch underhanded. His job was to let the batter hit the ball to put it in play. As the game evolved they moved further away from the batter. It took over 30 years but in the 1880s they reached the 60 feet 6 inch distance they're at now.

 

[Bohandas]

Regarding "nuclear", I think even the accepted proninciation might be the result of linguistic drift. If you look at the word's origin it really seems like it should be parsed differently; nuc-le-ar, like nucleus

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

This is the best of threads.

 

[Reynard]

TIL that in the early days of baseball the pitcher would pitch underhanded. His job was to let the batter hit the ball to put it in play. As the game evolved they moved further away from the batter. It took over 30 years but in the 1880s they reached the 60 feet 6 inch distance they're at now.

I always forget just how old baseball is.

 

[Aeson]

I always forget just how old baseball is.

The video I saw had it starting in 1845, but when I looked into it a few months ago, its roots go back another 50 years or so. The sport, in one form or another, has been around for approximately 200 years?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Maybe it's a Southern thing? I was in my 30s when it was pointed out that I did it. I never paid attention to it.

I'm a California boy, born and bred.

 

[billd91]

I've heard that George W Bush is to blame. He often mispronounced it. A friend pointed out that I was doing it. I corrected myself after that.

We may be able to blame GWB for a lot of things, but nukeyooler has been around as a pronunciation well before he was president. Even the Simpsons were riffing on it back in 1998.

 

[MoonSong]

I can't speak to Ulysses but this isn't quite right re: Hercules. The Greeks were still calling Herakles Herakles very long after the Romans started calling him Hercules. You can see this inscriptions very clearly.

Further, many Romans were also calling Herakles Herakles (or Heracles) at the time other Romans were calling him Hercules, and used a pretty wide variety of other names, some containing hercl, some containing heracl formations.

Also it seems like you're saying "Greeks called Herakles Hercules", but that is definitely incorrect if so, like that has never been the case, and I don't know why you have that idea. In fact, the Greeks had event and place names also based on Herakles and consistently stuck with that formation ("herakl"). You may be confusing this all with the Etruscans, who you can think of as proto-Romans. They called Herakles "Hercl" and the Roman approach comes from linguistic evolution from that, not Greek linguistic evolution.

So like, we cut to like 50 BC, Romans are generally saying Hercules or a variant thereof (though some more educated Romans or Grecophile or just Greco-Romans are saying Heracles), but people in Greece are still saying Herakles. They are not saying Herkules (it'd be very funny if they were I admit) let alone Hercules (they didn't have a c at that point, and the two letters they sometimes wrote in a c-like way weren't the hard k sound).

TLDR: No, it's not linguistic evolution from Greek, and no the Greeks did not use Hercules.

Not all Greeks. Consider that in the peninsula itself they weren't a monolith and the language had had a few centuries of Hellenism across the Mediterranean.

 

[Aeson]

I'm a California boy, born and bred.

Southern California?