YALP!

[gnomi]

[Poll #1043419]

Comments

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

it wasn't till i followed the link to the definition of gantlet/gauntlet that i realised i should have been saying gantlet all this time. i know darn well "gauntlet" is something that gets thrown down in order to declare war. i just thought...oh hell, i don't know what i've been thinking.

i think i need more coffee.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

You're not as wrong as you think. All of the dictionaries I checked, both the prescriptivist and descriptivist, allow both "gantlet" and "gauntlet" in the "run the ____" construct. I was just curious about how widespread "gantlet" usage is.

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

::whew::

[magid.livejournal.com]

What, no issues with gimlets?

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

::slurp::

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Gamut, of course, started off as a musical term. It comes from "Gamma ut", the lowest note on the lowest hexachord of Guido.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Cool. I hadn't known that.

[willa-writes.livejournal.com]

*wince* I got the gantlet/gauntlet oh, so wrong.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

Not so wrong... see my comments above and below. :-)

[readsalot.livejournal.com]

There's an article at dictionary.com that somewhat disagrees with the CJR article you cite--it says, in part "The English word was then influenced by the spelling of the word gauntlet, "glove," and in 1676 we find the first recorded instance of the spelling gauntlet for this word...".

I know that I use gauntlet for both meanings because I was corrected once for not doing so, and after consulting several dictionaries that all said that the spelling didn't matter, I decided that if they didn't care, I didn't either.

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

All the dictionaries -- both the prescriptivist and descriptivist -- that I checked permit both "gantlet" and "gauntlet" in the "run the____" construct. But since no one gets hit in a gauntlet-the-glove, I linked to the one that made clear what I meant by "gantlet."

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

See, the weird thing about using the spelling "gauntlet" for both words is that I, at least, pronounce them differently.

Then again, I suppose in the British pronounciation, they WOULD be the same: if the "a" in "gantlet" is pronounced like the "a" in "aunt" (which is pronounced identically to "ant" in MOST of the United States, although not, so much, in Boston), then the pronounciation would switch from how I say it to identically to "gauntlet", so I guess that makes sense.

[violetcheetah.livejournal.com]

i pronounce both "gantlet" and "aunt" like "ant". but then, i don't know that i've ever heard "gantlet" spoken, so i have presumed the pronunciation from the way it's spelled.

[sarsmicama.livejournal.com]

I'm confused about "run the gauntlet" why would you run a metal glove??

[kuroshii.livejournal.com]

maybe the people you're running between are all smacking you with theirs!?!

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

If you hadn't had the options (if it were just a fill-in), I would have said "gauntlet." But seeing them both together, I realized "gantlet" made more sense.