processes

[Thanks George for the good work on this.] I will maintain that the thesis of that portion of the lecture still stands: that an educated professional person will be intentional about the language they use, and not intimidated by pressure to unilatterally adopt the argot of people possibly less educated than themselves.

Dictionaries can be prescriptive in their pronunciation rules, that is, the way one should pronounce words, or descriptive in their pronunciation rules, the way "one hears it pronounced." I will caution against weighing the fact that a pronunciation appears in a descriptive dictionary too seriously (but note that even in descriptive dictionaries the "correct" or prescriptive pronunciation usually appears first, and that succeeding entries get increasingly suspect). Here is a counterargument:

At www.webster.com look up the words "library," and "temperature" and note the last pronunciations. Clearly "Li-bery" and "tempatur" e.g., are uneducated pronunciations, but they are given as having "been heard," in the dictionary.

There are justifications, for example, in computer science a teacher might use "processEEz" so that students do not confuse the spoken word processes, with processors.

Here is a hacked version of the processes entry (follow link above for full entry). Does one want to appear to have a "bungling affectation" with some portion of those 4/5ths that prefer the standard pronunciation? There is no "correct" answer to this, but it is worth being intentional, and knowing the issues, as an educated professional. E.g., if you choose processEEz, it is good to have the understanding that this probably joined the ranks of modern pronunciations through people wanting to sound educated by demostrating that they know about plurals for greek words, even though they were, in the end, displaying ignorance in applying it to a word that does not have that associated greek root. At least they were striving! -ce

USAGE NOTE:

In recent years there has been a tendency to pronounce the plural ending –es of processes as E>z, perhaps by analogy with words of Greek origin such as analysis and neurosis. But process is not of Greek origin, and there is no etymological justification for this pronunciation of its plural. However, because this pronunciation is not uncommon even in educated speech, it is generally considered an acceptable variant, although it still strikes some listeners as a bungled affectation. In a recent survey 79 percent of the Usage Panel preferred the standard pronunciation (-z) for the plural ending –es and 15 percent preferred the pronunciation (-z). •Although the pronunciation for process with a long (o), (prss), is more usual in British English, it is an acceptable variant in American English.