Friday, September 11: Bandersnatches
FAUX-KNOWLEDGY
by Steve Steinbock
I’m going be wordy this week. If you’re one of those readers who hate my columns about words and language, you may want to step out for a cup of coffee until tomorrow when John Floyd will be back slinging some of his high quality Mississippi Mud. My subject today is the crazy world of pronunciation.
I never knew that the word “aggravate” had an “a” in the middle until I heard Roxy Music sing the song “Love is the Drug.” I always said “aggervate” (sic). Ironically, it took Bryan Ferry singing the word “aggrovated” (sic) with an “o” in the middle – to draw my attention to the way the word is spelled.
And what is it with those stray Rs? I had a teacher in high school who pronounced the name of our state: “WaRshington.” She isn’t the only person I’ve heard doing that. Is it regional? Much more familiar is the R that gets shoved into the middle of familiar so it ends up sounding like fir-miliar. I’ve been keeping tabs, and more people add the R than don’t, without regard to the regional background of the speaker. (Linguists call the phenomenon “R-coloring”).
Speaking of state names, as a native of Oregon, I’ve always wondered why half the people in the US say the name incorrectly. It should be pronounced 
with a schwa. Instead, folks often put an 
before the end, so that it comes off Ori-gone (but not forgotten). Despite spelling differences, Oregonians pronounce the name of their state so that it sounds exactly like origin except with a hard G. (The origin of the word Oregon remains a mystery). Nobody says Washing-tawn. So why do they say Ori-gawn?
I shouldn’t be the one to complain. I know how to spell Arctic, but I can’t say it for beans. It always comes out Ar-tic. And undoubtedly the hardest common word for me to say is undoubtedly. I can’t even write it correctly. It always comes out as “undoubtably” (sic).
If everyone pronounces a certain word incorrectly, does that make it an acceptable (and thereby correct) pronunciation?
If standard English words weren’t hard enough, we pepper our speech with words and phrases from all over, including several ancient languages. Latin plurals have always given me a headache. I used to keep an index card taped to my computer monitor in order to keep several terms straight. But I do know a thing or two about Hebrew.
There are two plural endings in the Hebrew language: 
and 
. For a variety of reasons, the feminine form is often spelled (and pronounced) oth. Here’s where it gets weird: the Hebrew term for a large grazing mammal is B’hemah. A herd of large grazing animals are B’hem?t. But in English, we treat “Behemoth” as a singular noun. When I hear people referring to behemoths it is as grating as if they said “dogses” or “catses.”
Similar is are cherubim. The word is the plural of cherub, and refers to a winged and four-headed heavenly beast. (It’s funny that we describe sweet, innocent baby-faces as cherubic). But even the editors of the King James Bible screwed this one up, adding an English plural ending to an already plural word. The word “cherubims” doesn’t make sense.
One last observation that turns all my complaints on their ears: the utterances of ex cetera (sic) and visa versa (sic). When I’m feeling smug and priggish, I think to myself how intellectually superior I am that I know the terms as ET cetera and VICE versa. Well, knock me off my high-horse. Like my college Classics professor was wont to say, anyone who knew the correct pronunciation of ancient Latin “has been for a long, long time.” Classicists now tell us that the ancient Roman “c” is always pronounced as a hard “k” and the “v” is always pronounced like the English “w.” In other words, the real correct pronunciation would be:
ET KETERA
and
WEE-KEH WEHR-SUH
I’d never say them that way. So much for being correct.
Steve, as for R-coloring, a lot of folks here in the South say, for some reason, Chi-CAR-go. Don’t know why.
And George W. ALWAYS said nuke-u-ler instead of nuclear.
Steve: I, for one, love your columns about words and language. And I can’t help but contribute my own pet peeve: Treating “criteria” as a singular, when it’s in fact the plural of “criterion.” Criterias is just as bad as catses and dogses!
when I moved to the Evergreen State there used to be a live radio show in Seattle called Sandy Bradley’s Pot Luck. Each week they did a song “from the Northwest corner of the map” and the feature always ended with Sandy intoning “and there is no R in Washington.”
I had a friend fromMissouri who always got irritated if you ended the name of her state with an EE instead of an UH.
And on behalf of my native state may I say that New JOIzee is funny, but that’s a Brooklyn accent. If you want to sound like a real Garden Stater the unofficial pronunciation is New CHURZee.
Good column.
Back home in Indiana people warsh their hands, sometimes beat around the boosh and enjoy a good feesh dinner. Many of us can see no reason for extra letters in words so the Mississinewa River is simply the Missinewa, John lives in Missippi and the capital of the state is Ind-uh-napolis or Naptown. Brazil is Bray-zil, Peru is Pee-rue, Loogootee is Luh-go-tee and. . .oh, you get the idea. Make life easy for the tongue.
I too LOVE your columns about words and language. When it comes to different ways to pronounce city names, New Orleans must hold the record. News anchors everywhere (even here) seem to like dressing it up and pronouncing it New Or-lee-ins, but most folks I know who actually live there go for fewer syllables — they say New-wolluns.
And Mississippians always laugh at the way Biloxi is pronounced in newscasts from outside the state (Bi-LOCK-see). It’s actually Bi-LUX-see.
The town where I went to high school — Kosciusko — well, that’s a story in itself.
I also enjoy these kinds of columns. You should see people’s face when you try to explain the proper usage of datum (sing) and data (pl). I’m merely amused by their reactions. Language is a living thing, so data is data. And speaking of that, a prig is a pickpocket.
I’ve lived in Chahlottesville, Vahginyah. (Charlottesville, VA) The county surrounding that independent town is Abbemahrle. (Albemarle) I now live in Fred’rick (Fredneck when we want to be insulting) and Balmer (Baltimore) is east by 40 miles.
For me, the oddest pronunciations come out of KY-Ver-SAILS (Versailles, which, of course, is right outside of Paris), FAL-mouth with a hard, short, flat American a instead of the soft ah (Falmouth). Interestingly, it bugs me to hear people (nonlocals) say Louie-ville. The local pronunciation is LOU-uh-vulle.
Some very learned people have pronunciation blind spots. I had a college history professor who could not say escape, always pronounced it excape. Also met a sports writer who couldn’t say statistics (probably less from not knowing how to pronounce it than from just not being able to get his tongue around it) and had a very sharp library colleague who called a monograph a monogram (admittedly not quite the same thing). As far as swallowing syllables, my parents were faculty members at Santa Monica City College, whose nine syllables students often reduced to four: smocka cee codge. Do keep writing about language.
Speaking of words, the seventh definition of “to plug” in the Oxford English Dictionary is “to publicize, emphasize, draw attention to”; the first example given dating to 1906. Here’s a contemporary example:
Allow me to plug Steve’s book about key Hebrew words and their religious significance, These Words upon Our Hearts.
Gosh, everyone (especially JLW), thanks for all the kind words.
Wordy – that will be my epigraph. . . or is it epigram? . . . epitaph?
I live in Wichita, Kansas where we have the Arkansas River and a town called Arkansas City. And(thanks to century-old tradition) we pronounce them “OurKansas,” not “Are-Kan-Saw.” This gets me in trouble when I visit family in the State of Arkansas.
Steve, I gotta get your book! (Hmmm….”Wordy” Nickname or tattoo…..(nahhhh!)