So let's not call the whole thing off

I say tomarto, you say tomayto. I say research, you say research. The way I speak this latter word is the conventional English one, yours is north-American. Mine is (I suppose, though I hadn’t thought of it until just now) based on the stress found in the original French verb ‘rechercher’, from which we get the borrowed term ‘recherché’ meaning obscure.

‘Recherché’ and ‘obscure’ at first seem in English use to be identical - but the epithets refer to different aspects of obscurity: Latin ‘obscurus’ (= in the shade, veiled) describes the thing that is hidden; while ‘recherché’ (ultimately from Latin verb ‘circo’ = to go around in circles) describes the person trying to find it, and the effort that the search requires. That prefix ‘re-’ indicates continuous effort, again and again.

We find very different patterns of stress (in our enunciation, not our emotion) in the superficially similar two-syllable words release, re-launch and (modern) rehab. All these, and the differences between word stresses on either side of the Atlantic, serve to show how pronunciation and enunciation continually tend to evolve: what seemed ‘right’ yesterday may seem doubtful today and possibly ‘wrong’ tomorrow. Evolution is something even pedants have to live with.

So let’s not call the whole thing off