It's "NOO-klee-yur" / "NOO-klee-yur", not "NOO-kyoo-lar" / "NOO-kyoo-lus".
The reader mispronounced these words throughout, marring an otherwise enjoyable story.
Ugh, I am sort of accustomed to hearing nuclear mispronounced, but had to stop listening when nucleus was. It was disappointing to hear this in one of the top SCIENCE-fiction podcasts.
Oh, my beautiful nerds...
Adam Pracht here, Escape Pod audio producer and narrator on this one. Given that this has come up now three times (twice here, once to my Escape Artists email), I feel I should take just a few moments to address this.
Let me jump right to the point and say this from the get-go:
Yep, you're right about the most correct pronunciation of "nuclear" and "nucleus." Apologies for the error and for any distraction it may have caused from a perfectly wonderful story.
If that's all you care about, you can probably just stop here.
If, however, you are willing to read a little bit of behind-the-scenes information on how the error ended up in this episode - you might end up with a bit more sympathetic viewpoint on it (or, at least, have a better understanding of what happened).
First, let me explain that when I'm narrating a story, one of my first steps is usually to go through the manuscript and highlight any "problem" words in terms of pronunciation, followed by a short guide for myself on how to pronounce it. "Nuclear" and "nucleus" are - for whatever reason - words that I frequently will flub if I'm not thinking about them consciously and carefully.
Normally, these are ones I would highlight for myself and insert the phonetic pronunciation.
This time, however, in a sea of hard-to-pronounce words (among them: sesquipedalian, somnambulant, Eidetic, stearate, phenethylamine, theobromine, Enceladus, molybdenum, technetium, quiescence, asymptotic, gu huo niao, Hagoromo ... not to mention 11 lines in Middle English from Paradise Lost), I'm afraid I missed spotting these two.
Secondly, let me assure that the incomparable S.B. Divya - your fantastic co-editor - did her job perfectly - catching the error and bringing it to my attention.
At that point, however, my voice unfortunately sounded like this:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/troom0sw3tzkve8/recording310594164.mp3?dl=0 This is just a link to an mp3 of the actual audio message I sent to Divya that day.
As I say in the message, if I had tried to re-record it to fix the error, those sections would have sounded /glaringly/ wrong because of how messed up and frog-like my voice was.
It's just now starting to get back to normal, so I'm considering doing a re-record of those sections and uploading a fix (as I am currently unemployed, however, my first priority is getting full-time employment again, which I'm sure you all can understand).
In the meantime, if I were going to make a retcon argument, it might be that the entire story is, ostensibly, first person narration and my mispronunciations of "nuclear" and "nucleus" are "a pronunciation variant that occurs in educated speech but that is considered by some to be questionable" (Merriam-Webster).
In other words... still not really correct, but absolutely what one might hear in everyday speech.
(And, dare I mention, my error will probably eventually become an accepted variant. After all, it's a common process in language evolution called "metathesis" where sounds swap around in spoken language. It's why we say "bird" and not "brid", "wasp" and not "waps" and "horse" instead of "hros.")
(Peers intently to see whether anyone is buying it... No...?)
Until I can get it fixed, again, please accept my apology, and I hope to get a new, fixed version up soon.
Thanks,
-Adam