July 17, 1996

-lived

The mispronunciation of "short-lived" by practically everyone, esp. nitwits on TV, is one of my longest-lived pet peeves. It has a long "i", of course, because it's an adjectival form of "life," not of "live." It's always seemed obvious to me: He had a short temper; he was short-tempered. He had a short life; he was short-lived. Care to join my campaign to stamp out "short-livd"?

Well, no, because it's almost certainly a losing battle.

Etymologically, you are correct. The "-lived" in short-lived (or long-lived, for that matter) comes from life, noun, + the adjectival ending -ed. The f turns to a v the same way it happens in the leaf leaves pair. "-lived" should therefore be pronounced with a vowel rhyming with "eye." The problem is that lived, the past tense of the verb "to live," is tremendously more common, so people often pronounce the "-lived" adjective as if it were the verb "lived."

Confusion between verb forms in -ed and adjectives in -ed is not that unusual. In the expression "shelled peanuts," most people interpret "shelled" as being from the verb "to shell," meaning 'to remove the shell'. Sometimes, though, people mistake "shelled" for being the noun "shell" + -ed, so that "shelled peanuts" means 'peanuts in the shell'. In your example, the confusion is amplified by the rarity of the adjective form "-lived." Changes in pronunciation based on analogy is also common: to take a famous example, zoology, which etymologically should be pronounced "zoh-ahl-uh-gee," is often pronounced with the first syllable rhyming with zoo because the word "zoo" is so much more frequent.

Pronouncing "short-" or "long-lived" rhyming with "give" has been noticed and objected to for some time. It's even warned against in H.W. Fowler's 1926 Modern English Usage, considered the handbook for this sort of thing. Nowadays, it seems as if this pronunciation is rapidly becoming the only one. An informal survey of recent college graduates showed not only that they all pronounced it to rhyme with "give," but that they all thought the pronunciation rhyming with "eye" was pretentious. So I'm afraid that there seems to be little likelihood that you will ever succeed in stamping out the "short i" variant.