With HBO's Silicon Valley season three premiere on Sunday, we're taking a look back at an unsettling moment from season two and settling the debate once and for all: Have we been pronouncing the word "flaccid" wrong all this time?
"What I think I'm seeing is the human equivalent of a flaccid penis," Erlich Bachmann says in the season two premiere.
"'Flaxid.' It's actually pronounced 'flaxid,'" Richard Hendricks corrects him.
Wait—what?
Lo and behold, according to Google, the proper pronunciation is ˈ"fla(k)səd/"—the same as Richard's.
If you've been pronouncing the two "c"s in the middle like an "s" sound, don't worry. Google's parentheses around the "k" mean it's optional, University of Missouri linguistics professor Matthew Gordon told NTRSCTN in a statement.
In Latin, the word's language of origin, the double letter "c" is pronounced "like a 'k' held for an extra beat," he explained.
"The fact that 'flaccid' is not a very common word—feel free to insert a 'happens to everyone at some point' joke if you like—means that we would be more likely to rely on analogies with other, more familiar words to determine our pronunciation," he said. Since there aren't any other common words with the "accid" spelling, people may have assumed it rhymed with "acid" and "placid."
Historian and author Daniel A. Willis agreed that if we went by the Latin pronunciation, we would actually pronounce it "flakkid."
Willis told NTRSCTN in a statement that we have the 1099 Norman invasion of England to thank for our current pronunciation.
"In a mistaken effort to appease the French, several previous 'k' sounds became 's' sounds if they were spelled with 'c's, even if the French themselves were maintaining the 'k' sounds," he said. "It was the English who softened those sounds, thinking they were speaking proper French, when they were really just being barely understandable."
We say "flaccid" the way we do because the English misunderstood French, plus we don't talk about sex a lot.
The English language has evolved from its Latin roots since the eleventh century, so obviously, you're free to pronounce "flaccid" the same way you've heard it in the past. But if you feel like trolling your friends next time they talk about a lackluster sexual experience, you can always switch it up.
This post originally appeared on NTRSCTN.com
