In his latest article, “Packing a Series of Pluses,” New York Times tech columnist David Pogue went 1 for 2 in his phonetic terminology:
Apparently, the people in positions of power at Palm weren’t completely pleased with the plethora of P’s in the appellations “Palm Pre” and “Palm Pixi,” the app phones Palm produced for Sprint. Palm has now expanded the parade of P’s with a pair of improved products: the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus.
(We’ll pause while you repair your palate after all those plosives.)
Props to Pogue for working “plosives” in there, possibly a first in the history of the Times. But what’s up with the “palate” business? If he knows enough to identify /p/ as a voiceless bilabial plosive, he should also know that the palate doesn’t enter into its articulation.
But of course the alliteration was irresistible, not to mention the allusion to the expression “cleanse one’s palate” (where palate means not “‘roof of the mouth’ but ‘sense of taste’), so I suppose we can give Pogue a pass on this one.
(Hat tip, Greg Howard.)
[Update: Pogue actually is not the first Times writer to refer to “plosives.” A piece from August 16, 1972 by Francis Griffith entitled “A Better Idear” includes this line (accurate in its phonetics but appalling in its folk-phonetics):
Indigenous Brooklynites found the sounds of t and th, one plosive and the other fricative, incongruent for their easy-going ways, and therefore avoided them. They preferred d, a softer, lazier sound.
More recently it appeared in a 2001 article about a British voice coach who “stresses the difference among plosives, fricatives and affricates.” And former Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh used it a few times to talk about rapping styles (“spectacularly popped plosives,” “pop some plosives,” “distended vowels bounded by hyper-enunciated plosives.”)]