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How to Pronounce “Processes”: You Want Cheese with That?

Have you heard somebody pronounce “processes” with a long “e” in the last syllable (process-eez)?  It’s usually at a corporate “pep talk” where they are describing how their new “process-eez” will turn all the employees’ shit to gold, which is why they are removing the washrooms and everyone needs to bring ziplocks to put their shit in the shit-to-gold bin in the coffee room.  Besides having shit in the coffee room — I guess it’s not that big of a loss since the coffee is shit anyways — what bothers me about this pronunciation is that it doesn’t make sense, and only serves as an attempt to artificially inflate the importance of the matter.

Cheese Dick

Photo courtesy of stephdil

I guess the idea behind this stupid pronunciation is by analogy to words like “hypotheses” and “parentheses”, but the analogy doesn’t work.

The Nobility
Singular Plural
hypothesis hypotheses
parenthesis parentheses
thesis theses
testis testes
processis (NO!!!) processes

What we have is a haughty little group of words that insist on keeping their Greek plural form; and “process”, you’re not part of the club.  You need to go back and hang out with the normal English words.

The Peasantry
Singular Plural
glass glasses
class classes
press presses
guess guesses
process (There you go!) processes

I don’t blame the shepherds for using this trick, and I doubt many of them do it consciously. The sheep will be impressed, after all. “Ooh, this person uses big words. And even with the words I know, somehow they’re different when this person uses them. They must be really edumakated.” But to the wolves in the room “process-eez” just sounds like “processed cheese”.

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4 Responses to "How to Pronounce “Processes”: You Want Cheese with That?"

  1. Roy says:

    You left out success and successes. I might say ” Stop the presseez. Somebody get me my glasseez. My new processeez led to many successeez!!”

  2. Bill says:

    I could not agree more. At my current employer this processeeeeez phrase used used by EVERYBODY and is the first marker indication that the person is padding words to make up for content.

    1. Ah, good ol’ corporate pep talks! That’s why I left that gig.

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