OddThinking

The trainer was droning explaining to the class some fine point of object-oriented design, when he stumbled on a word that he wasn’t familiar with – English was his second language. He paused for a moment in thought, and then proudly pronounced the word perfectly: “mod’i·fi’a·bil’i·ty!”

Looking at the bemused class, he explained that during the pause he was working out which was the fifth-to-last syllable. That left the class even more confused.

In long words in the English language, he explained, the fifth-to-last syllable is emphasized.

That was a tactical error – he lost the attention of the class for the next ten minutes as they set out to prove him wrong. They murmured to themselves: modifiability, modifiable, unmodifiable, modification – debating the correct placement of syllable breaks and which syllable is being stressed.

Whether the trick works in all cases or not, I find it quite amusing when we find that we (in this case, native English speakers, but more generally as well) have internalised such obscure rules without ever realising that they existed.