Dialects and barbiturates:

I was reading the Harvard Dialect Survey this weekend, and I guess I've never gotten very near the end. One of the later questions, though, was "how do you pronouce the word for the type of drug that acts as central nervous system depressant and is used as a sedative or hypnotic?" The choices were barbituate, barbiturate, and a couple of unimportant things. I had always thought it was barbiturate, and was surprised to learn that 78% of the population disagreed with me. I figured I was wrong, but on googling barbiturate, discovered that the word was spelled with two "r"s. I checked on Dictionary.com, and they gave four different pronunciations, the first three of which pronounced the final r. I asked other bloggers, all of whom believed that the word had only one r. Just a bit of dialectical weirdness.

And, for that matter, can you use two modals in a sentence? Maybe. According to what I've found, it seems to depend on how you define modal. If you include "have to" as a modal, then yes, you can. That is, "I may have to go to the store tomorrow" is OK. But then where's the rule that says that "I might could go to the store tomorrow" is wrong? I can't actually find it. Some places define modals as "might have," "could have," etc, so there two modals in a row won't work. But it is possible to use might or could by themselves, so I'm not sure how this would work.

Ah, grammar. If I didn't hate so much of linguistics, maybe I could be a linguist.