1-0, Chart

Getting hit with a thrown ball while out of the base path would be interference.

Garner:

“Flaccid” is preferably pronounced /FLAK-sid/, not /FLA-sid/. All the traditional pronunciation guides have said so — and they’re right. As one authority explains: “When ‘cc-’ precedes ‘-e’ or ‘-i,’ the first ‘c-’ is pronounced ‘k-,’ the second ‘s-,’ as in ‘accede,’ ‘accelerate,’ ‘accept,’ ‘accessible,’ ‘flaccid,’ ‘succinct,’ etc.” Norman Lewis, Dictionary of Modern Pronunciation 76 (1963). The exception is Italian words used in English, such as “cappuccino.”

The limp, flabby pronunciation of the word — which some have tried to rationalize as a kind of sensory onomatopoeia (the logic being that “flaccid” denotes what is soft and should therefore have a soft “c” in the middle) — started gaining some (grudging) acceptance in the mid-20th century in Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1961) and other wordbooks.

In short, this word is a kind of skunked term: pronounce it in the traditional way, and you’ll take some flak for doing so; pronounce it in the new way, and the cognoscenti will probably infer that you couldn’t spell or say “cognoscenti,” either.

As a result of the spreading mispronunciation, the misspelling “flacid” (on the analogy of “placid”) has arisen — e.g.: “The succulent shellfish practically melted on the tongue, but the tempura coating was oddly flacid [read ‘flaccid’].” Cynthia Kilian, “A Win, Win Situation,” N.Y. Post, 12 May 2002, at 55.