Poignant - resulting in keen distress. The word comes to English from Old French, descended from the Latin pungere: to prick or pierce.
Over the past week, I've felt precisely this distress as three separate students in three separate upper-division English classes talked about how "poyg-nant" a certain passage was to them.
Allow me to point back to the definition - the word comes to us from Old French! Just as mignon is not "mig-non," poignant is not "poyg-nant" but "poin-yant."
It never ceases to amaze me how many people learn a word from a book and proceed to use it without ensuring they are pronouncing it correctly or even using it in the proper context. In a previous class, a student began speaking of Poe's work as "MACK-a-bray." Really? Because I've always found it to be quite macabre myself. But nothing beats when a classmate described the ideas of a literary theorist as "fick-TITTY-ous." After the initial reaction of holding back a blast of laughter, I couldn't help but wonder if he was even sure what "fictitious" actually meant.
If we were living in the 1980's, I could understand some of the errors. After all, checking a dictionary or encyclopedia for pronunciation and usage in that era would, for many, have involved a trip to the local library. But today we have both dictionary.com and Wikipedia. There's simply no excuse - the answers are just a mouse click away. If anything is poignant, it's the fact that these painful mispronunciations still exist in the age of information.
