Southern Comfort wrote:No, keep going. Campaign against "conTROVersy" when it should be "CONtroVERsy", "forMIDable" when it should be "FORmidable", "priMARily" when it should be "PRImarily", and all the other regular mutilations of our language which are born of nothing more than ignorance.
By all means hold on to your views, but be prepared to recognise your role in the drama! Oldies like you and me are supposed to feel grumpy about change, that's part of being human. It doesn't make any difference to the way language develops, though. 'Campaigning', then, just means 'getting hot under the collar'. It's a hobby.
The shift away from those cumbersome initial-stressed polysyllables seems quite natural to me - a little bit of regularising of the alternation of strong and weak syllables. Perhaps I'm younger than you after all, SC.
