Thursday, May 30, 2013

Comptroller - the 'p'?

With Vinod Rai, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) having retired, we are less likely to read and hear about that office for few, even if in a Constitutional office, attract such attention as he had because of his report on G2 telephony and the presumptive loss of 1.7 lakh crore.

It was so often used that CAG, an abbreviation became the norm for referring to the office, even in the first reference breaking a journalistic norm, that very few had to grapple with Comptroller, with a p. How is it pronounced? We in India do bring that p when uttering it. Do we need to?

We needn't.The Merriam-Webster online dictionary's audio facility excludes that p. Try it here. The freedictionary which provides audio support for both British and American pronunciation too skips the p. Click on the Union Jack.

The Oxford Dictionaries, online, explains that its origin is "late 5th century: variant of CONTROLLER, by erroneous association with French compte 'calculation' or its source, later Latin comptus"


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