Let's be honest: America has unhitched itself from phonics; we are independent, self-sufficient, and certainly above needing rules concerning letters in order to create a word. Let the laws of language roam where they may; we are not following, and that's our final answer.
The word nuclear, for example, is quite challenging for many well-respected people, including my husband and our very own President. Somehow, the word that looks so simple on the page comes out NU-kew-lar. Embrace relativism: exchanging one vowel for another and moving things around a bit is fine; besides, everyone is doing it.
My latest mispronounced favorite is sudoku. It is always spelled the same way. Every consonant has a vowel after it that sounds like it looks. Should be a shoo in, but I've heard everything from su-DOO-ko to so-KOO-doo, and, most recently, su-KOO-do, which sounds more like some sort of martial arts move than a logic puzzle. Americans have always had a hard time learning other people's languages.
Of course, I must reveal my own hypocrisy: I've always called a plague a "pleg," which, unfortunately sounds strikingly like an abbreviation for "prosthetic leg" rather than an epidemic.
The most nucular pleg, however, is that America is not hooked on phonics. But who needs to learn phonics when you could do a sukudo puzzle instead?
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