Last night’s State of the Union speech — and today’s water-cooler conversation — compelled me to research the whole “nucular” thing. Why Does Bush Go “Nucular”?:
When speaking about nuclear weapons, George W. Bush invariably pronounces the word “nucular.” Is this an acceptable pronunciation?
Not really. Changing “nu-clee-ar” into “nu-cu-lar” is an example of what linguists call metathesis, which is the switching of two adjacent sounds. (Think of it this way: “nook le yer” becomes “nook ye ler.”) This switching is common in English pronunciation; you might pronounce “iron” as “eye yern” rather than “eye ron.” Why do people do it? One reason, offered in a usage note in the American Heritage Dictionary, is that the “ular” ending is extremely common in English, and much more common than “lear.” Consider particular, circular, spectacular, and many science-related words like molecular, ocular, muscular.
Bush isn’t the only American president to lose the “nucular” war. In his “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine in May 2001, William Safire lamented that, besides Bush, at least three other presidents — Eisenhower, Carter, and Clinton — have mangled the word.
The mispronunciation is so common that Merriam-Webster lists it as “a pronunciation variant that occurs in educated speech but that is considered by some to be questionable or unacceptable.” They get so many complaints about listing “nucular” that they have a prepared statement defending their decision.