that it all boils down to what we were taught. I do feel that TV writers have a lot to answer for also, as they want to be perceived as being current but do not realise that they are projecting bad influences to young people. Robert on December 7, 2008 9:52 am "Arctic" was actually borrowed into English from the Latin word "articus" (note the lack of a 'c' before the 't'). The Latin word, however, comes from the Greek word "arktikos". At some point, the powers that be decided to add a silent 'c' to the spelling to be more etymologically accurate. Following the change, people spent decades complaining (such as you are here) about all those stupid people pronouncing the silent 'c'. In fact, /ah-tick/ is the only pronunciation the OED gives for this word (that being the british "r-less" pronunciation) I tend to be a descriptivist, and feel that, linguistically speaking, it's pointless to enforce all these little rules that people feel are so important. From a stylistic point of view, yes, there are things that sound better than others, there are pronunciations that sound "uneducated", and there probably is some value in people knowing what the "correct" way to say something is. What I get really annoyed with is people claiming that all the mispronunciations and slips in grammar are indicative of an overall decline in language, and pretty soon we will be reduced to gibberish. This is simply not held up by the evidence. People