Vowel movements

Oh what a difference a vowel can make!
Take the word “engineer”, from the Latin root “ingenero”, meaning “to generate”. I remember a science teacher once lamenting that while the English word calls to mind trains and cars and filthy greasy engines, the French use “ingénieur”, evoking thoughts of ingenuity. (This teacher had failed to persuade a single female student to attend an engineering careers day, and he was using that pesky English vowel as a scapegoat).
But, as I discovered yesterday, it’s also possible to change the perceived root of a word by simply altering the pronunciation of a single vowel.

The combination of severe frost and an early morning meeting had forced me off my bike and onto the bus for the day. I find that the only way to survive this experience is to plug myself into my iPod, and on this occasion I was listening to the January 15th edition of the Nature podcast. (You try, is very nice). One of the main features was an interview with one Mitch Waldrop about W’s impact on science and medicine, and what President Obama might do differently.
In the middle of a discussion of the Bush administration’s abstinence-only approach to fighting the AIDS crisis in Africa, Waldrop mentioned the danger of introducing ideology into science policy.
Now, I’ve been known to mispronounce many a word in my time, so maybe the way I’ve always pronounced “ideology” is wrong. Or maybe it’s a UK-US thing. But I’ve always said “eye-deology”. Long “i” sound.
As in “idea”.
Waldrop used a short “i” sound.
As in “idiot”.
Or possibly “idiom”, although that wasn’t the first thing that sprang to mind, making me laugh out loud on the bus…