Reality - Really?

No, it must be spelled realety.  Who knows?  When people don't care enough to actually think about the words they are attempting to say, what difference does spelling make?

This is a brief gripe session about my profession and the lack of respect my own kind pay to our industry.  Day after day, I must hear people destroy the word realty.  As well as Realtor.  My own company's founder and owner for four decades uses these foolish terms continually as do all the other Realtors in my office except for the daughter of the boss.  She's now the managing broker as her dad moves into semi-retirement (an expression that always makes me picture a truck driver retiring his old semi!).  Anyway, the daughter who grew up hearing the awful pronunciation of her dad's profession, somehow trained herself to say it correctly, so now she and I are the two of our group who know how to say "realty." 

Above, I said that this strange, non-word must be spelled realety.  The fact that most people (even many who know how to pronounce nuclear) say real-i-ty must be a bi-product of their ease of saying realestate, run together in this way as though dealing with one word.  So it follows that a company that practices realestate would place the word realety in its title.  And those agents working there are Realetors.  If people would stop and write down what they are saying - which Realtors do every day but use the actual spelling of realty - they should notice that the way they pronounce it does not match up with the way they write it.  They write two syllables and pronounce a third one that isn't there.  Now if they were to carefully sound out the manner in which they are speaking the word realty, they would probably have to write reality.  Why would they then not notice that in reality, they are speaking an entirely different word?  And why would anyone who uses these terms daily not only know how to pronounce them but also be instructing others (at least by example) in how to say them? 

So if you call my realestate office and anyone other than the managing broker should answer the phone (yours truly does not answer phones at the office), you'll hear, "CherryValleyRealety; how may I help you?"  Hopefully you will answer, "Oh, well, in reality I was hoping to reach a realty office!"  Of course you wouldn't do this, and as a courteous person, neither do I.  But it always requires discipline on my part to not hold an impromptu class in simple pronunciation logic.

It occurs to me that a professional Realtor would have reason to say either Realtor or realty somewhere between 20 and 40 times per day - over the course of a year, perhaps 10,000 times.  So in consistently saying Realetor and realety instead, the four-decade professional fellow mentioned above has waisted around half a million syllables and made people like me want to stop and correct him half a million times.  Hard to find any logic to this common foolishness.

But it does give critics like me a chance to feel superior!