I remember my surprise about that word. I was probably in 7^th grade, and it made no sense to me. We say “pronounce.” Why not “pronounciation?” It was a mystery similar to how a flute was played by a flautist instead of a flutist.

I started to get it after awhile. I began to understand how a word could change its internal vowels by shifting to another part of speech and acquiring a prefix or suffix. I started learning Spanish and flauta became flute. But some pronunciations continue to surprise me.

Chief among those is “desultory.” I’ve read widely. I’ve seen that word a lot. I’ve known that it means passing from one thing to another in random, disconnected, unmethodical manner, but I never heard the it pronounced until recently. In my head, it was always “des-UL-tor-y.” Not so. The accent is on the first syllable: DES-ul-tor-y. That changes how the “s” sounds.

(By the way, the word comes from the Latin desultorius or desultor, both of which refer to the circus performer who leapt from one horse to another).

Pronunciations can change. When I was in college I once said “secretive” with the accent on the first syllable and a professor corrected me. “You mean ‘se-CRE-tive’” he said. That almost made me laugh. It sounded like something oozing out of my pores instead of a concealment. But I thanked him, proceeded to the library, and looked it up. He was absolutely right. Ten years later, when I bought a big home dictionary, I checked again. Se-CRE-tive was preferred but was followed by “often SE-cre-tive.” If you consult online dictionaries today, you’ll see that the word now carries that first-syllable stress.