Derivations of the Latin for "faith(ful)" are often abbreviated, for example in "Semper Fi(delis)" or "Hi(gh) Fi(delity)".

[QUOTE=only_human;425432]Well of course you know and pronounce it correctly. I have never pronounced the second word with two syllables. I don't think most of my peers would recognize it.[/QUOTE]My initial reaction is that there may be a US/UK distinction. On consideration, I wondered if there was a selection bias in my estimate of typical UK behaviour. Perhaps I associate more with those who are more likely to recognize and use the Latin pronunciation.

I'll investigate further, but if non-US speakers would like to chip in that would be helpful.

Paul

[QUOTE=xilman;425472]I'll investigate further, but if non-US speakers would like to chip in that would be helpful.[/QUOTE]
Spent the first 29 years of my life in the UK. Heard "bona fide" very rarely, and it would often result in the speaker being asked what it meant, but I'm pretty sure it was always 2+2 syllables just as you know it.

[QUOTE=xilman;425472]My initial reaction is that there may be a US/UK distinction. On consideration, I wondered if there was a selection bias in my estimate of typical UK behaviour. Perhaps I associate more with those who are more likely to recognize and use the Latin pronunciation.

I'll investigate further, but if non-US speakers would like to chip in that would be helpful.

Paul[/QUOTE]
I think this is a UK/US distinction after all. I just checked [I]Forvo.com[/I] .
Forvo is [I]the[/I] place to go to check local native pronunciation.
[url]http://forvo.com/word/bona_fide/#en[/url]

political expediency: the art of choosing a victorious candidate you support rather than one who is actually qualified to do the job.

Zipf's Law w.r.t. 30,000+ Project Gutenberg texts.
[URL="http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2016/02/surprising-mathematical-law-tested-project-gutenberg-texts"]Surprising Mathematical Law tested on Project Gutenberg Texts[/URL]
[QUOTE]Zipf's law in its simplest form, as formulated in the thirties by American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, states surprisingly that the most frequently occurring word in a text appears twice as often as the next most frequent word, three times more than the third most frequent one, four times more than the fourth most frequent one, and so on.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]The researchers studied the validity of the three most frequently used formulations of Zipf's law in all the English-language texts (31,075 books) in the Project Gutenberg database, and they observed that one of these formulations fits, with statistically significant results (p>0.05), the frequency of occurrence of all the words in over 40 percent of the books in the collection, texts that contain between 100 and over a million words.[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]According to the analysis, if the rarest words are left out — those that appear only once or twice throughout a book — 55 percent of the texts fit perfectly into Zipf's law, in its most general formulation. If all the words are taken into account, even the rarest ones, the figure is 40 percent.[/QUOTE]

Impossible (politics): possible. Often used in a converse formulation with one or more "not" qualifiers. In this formulation, the actual number of "not"s used does not appear to semantically meaningful.
cf. Inflammable, infamous
[QUOTE]Nothing is impossible. The word itself says "I'm possible"[INDENT]Audrey Hepburn[/INDENT][/QUOTE]

SWMBO (apocryphal): She Who Must Behave Obsequiously

[QUOTE=only_human;429404]SWMBO (apocryphal): She Who Must Behave Obsequiously[/QUOTE]
shhhhhh! hope she doesn't read... :sirrobin:

Original Sin:
[SPOILER]Sin(0)[/SPOILER]

increment (n): another word for :poop: while it's still inside you.