I think we all know that languages inevitably evolve, and what used to be "proper" may now be "ignorant", and vice versa.

I'm in the midst of reading James Boswell's magnum opus, The Life of Samuel Johnson. For those who might not know, Samuel Johnson was the bright and shining star of English literature in the late 18th Century, and was the author of Johnson's groundbreaking dictionary of that time, which more or less defined forever what a general dictionary of the language was supposed to do and be.

Now my point: He pronounced and promoted the pronunciation of "heard" as "heered", on the ground that the pronunciation "herd" was a lone and regrettable exception to the generally accepted pattern in English of pronouncing the letter combination "ear" as "eer".

And on this side of the pond, the great American philologist and dictionary writer Noah Webster, in dealing with the word "ask", prescribed the pronunciation "aks".

Today, 250 years later, a person using either of those pronunciations is almost sure to be pegged as careless, if not downright ignorant.

Dave Oesterreich