The Tin Lizard

Pronouncing Our Unspellable Language

He's b-a-a-a-c-k!  The Pronunciation Grump.  Didn't we promise he would be (or did you take that as more of a threat?)

Everybody knows English (even the more refined version known as American English) is difficult to spell, and that also makes it difficult to pronounce.  But one of my peeves is people who make it even more difficult by giving their kids oddly spelled names that they may be stuck with for life.  (Ever heard of the "Boy Named Sue?") 

Speaking of Sue, that's what got me thinking about this whole matter.  On television last week, a woman whose name has appeared on book covers:  Suze Orman.  It turns out that she wants to pronounce that first name like "Susie."  When I see it, I want to pronounce it "sooze" (rhymes with "ooze").  Was it Mom who confused the issue?  In English we can go with Soozie, Suzie, Susey, Souzee, and maybe other spellings that would give her the pronunciation she seemed to want.  But "Suze" is "Sooze."  

I think back to a skier named "Picabo," and pronounced (by her Mom at least) as "peek-a-boo."  Same deal:  Maybe, if you stretch, the first syllable could be "peek" but that last syllable can't be anything but "bo" in English.  It doesn't help that the name comes from a little town; towns aren't people.  If you happened to meet this woman and she told you her name, you might not worry about how it's spelled; but as most folks won't ever meet her, she was doomed from birth to have a lot of people mispronounce her.

The same problem sometimes extends to last names, too.  Let's take the writer Michael Crichton.  Clearly, "kritch-ton," yet people tell me he liked to pronounce it "cry-ton."  Wow.  English has a lot of weird spellings, and even consonant clusters that can be pronounced more than one way (tough/through).  But I really can't think of anyplace in English where "ch" is just silent.   Can we just spell things any old way?  If I said my name was spelled "Harjklixor" but pronounced "Jones" how would you react? 

The problem becomes even worse, of course, when names derive from those devilish foreign languages we don't know.  I am not constantly plugged into television or other audio media, so when I encounter a name like "Sinise"  (sinus? synice? sineezey?) or Proulx (I think that one is Basque so I'm going with "proo"), I just have to take a wild guess.   It would be a great help if book jackets could tell us how the author's name is pronounced (rather than giving us another of those idiotic blurbs); it would be heaven if television shows and movies had voiceovers to r-e-a-d aloud the names of the cast as they roll across the screen. 

The Pronunciation Grump

Diane Sawyer mangled the pronunciation of the relatively simple name of the Serbian war criminal Ratko Mladic the other night.  Maybe she thought that since he "allegedly" massacred many, it was OK to commit the same crime on his name.  More likely, I think, she just couldn't do it, and her trouble reminded me again how much trouble Americans have in pronouncing foreign words. 

For example, it's hard to think of a French word that IS pronounced correctly in the U.S.  -- Lingerie?  Déjâ vu?  Chaise longue?  Pierre L'Enfant?  Nope, none of those.  (On the subway in our area, the drivers have to announce "L'Enfant Plaza" and it usually comes out sounding like "Lawn Fawn," so you get off expecting to find a selection of concrete Bambis somewhere on the street above.  This is what they mean by "lenfant terrible," I guess.)  Other languages fare no better.   We do with them what we will and leave them broken and disheveled on the sidewalk behind us. 

We come honestly by our tendency to commit mayhem on foreign languages.  It is inherited from the Brits, who do the same thing and have been doing so for centuries, perhaps because political-military imperialism fosters linguistic imperialism.  Otherwise, how did München become "Munich," Mumbai "Bombay," or Firenze "Florence?"  But whatever its origin, long experience with the practice has enabled the average Brit to mispronounce foreign words without a second's hesitation.  A London newscaster would have mispronounced "Mladic" the same way Diane Sawyer did but he wouldn't have stumbled a bit in doing so.

Having noted the phenomenon of twisting foreign words, however, I'm really not looking to wage a big campaign to correct things.  We can't expect everybody to know the pronunciation rules of dozens of languages, and some foreign sounds don't exist in English, so a degree of error is natural and predictable.  The same occurs among speakers of other languages when they try to pronounce English.   We can, however, expect at least those whose job is to present foreign news to try to get it right.

NOTE: When the Pronunciation Grump returns (soon!), he'll talk about some problems we have with pronunciation in our own language.

The Story Of The Weeping Camel - A Colt Classic?

One last comment on films.  Just a day or two before Mothers' Day this year, we happened to watch the documentary film "The Story of the Weeping Camel." It relates the saga of a nomadic Mongolian family during camel breeding season, and in particular focuses on one camel and her newborn colt. (Yes, newborn camels apparently are called "colts.") 

I can't say more about it without giving away too much, but you really should see this one.  It's an interesting ethnographic study, and it's also particularly relevant to Mothers' Day.

The movie is available from Netflix.   Oh, and at the start, it quaintly offers the option of watching it in the original Mongolian. 

The Unwords

Decades ago, the soft drink known as Seven-Up, a clear carbonated drink with a flavor the company described as "lemon-lime," (somewhat dubiously in my opinion) devised a marketing campaign to set itself apart from the competition.  Since most if not all of the other most popular soda pops of the time were colas, Seven-Up became "The Uncola."   Does Seven-Up still exist?  I don't know; I don't drink much soda, never much liked Seven-Up anyway, and I don't see ads for it any more.   But at the time, the "uncola" campaign seemed to have some traction, helping the brand to establish its uniqueness.

If the brand does still exist, could there be a time in the distant future when colas have fallen so completely out of favor that only the Uncola survives, and we wonder what on earth a "cola" was?

Well, finally we're on my real subject:  I'm intrigued that there are so many words in English that are the negative of something for which no positive exists. 

One of my favorite examples is "disgruntled."  When I hear it used to describe a person (usually a group of people), I am concerned, because that's an unpleasant state most people don't want to be in, and I wonder to myself how we might make them gruntled again.

"Unkempt" is another.  Is English an unkempt language, that allows these unpaired words to hang around?  To paraphrase Prof Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady, why can't the English... be more kempt?  I suspect German is very kempt!

Even among informal slang words, we sometimes accentuate the negative.  The whole trend "discombobulates" me, and I'd far rather be combobulated.

There are plenty of other examples.  Indubitably you can think of a few yourself.  Like so many aspects of this quirky language we speak, I find them fascinating. It seems unlikely now that uncola would be one of them someday, but who knows? 

 

Parting With Friends - Such Sweet Sorrow

Lately when I had to move most of the books in our house to make way for painters, it finally struck me.   There were just too many of them! (Books, not painters.)

I've always been an inveterate book buyer (so has my wife, though we acquire different kinds of things).  We'd get the interesting-sounding stuff from reviews and bestseller lists; the secondary works of an author whose best novels we read; reference books on almost any subject as long as they were voluminous and thorough.... and on and on.  We're both book-keepers, too, never really very willing to part with any of them, but two or three things converged in my consciousness:

• Moving them made me very aware that books are heavy, bulky, take up space and collect dust.
• A charitable organization we know locally is holding a used book sale in a few weeks to raise money.
• In the age of e-readers, online book readers, and the like, there's not much need for physical books these days.  I could literally put my entire collection in a Kindle (if I were willing to pay the money to buy the ebooks to do it).  I read lately about a man who was remodeling his apartment and had decided that he would get rid of ALL his printed books, ALL his DVD collection, ALL music CDs, and just go with the electronic versions. 

Taking all these things into account, it almost seemed as if I'd better start getting rid of books while they were still in demand by someone!  Well, not quite, of course.  Many of these books are really old friends ... some of them books I bought in college, perhaps even as part of a course (I still remember my English prof's analysis of Thomas Mann's "Confessions of the Confidence Man Felix Krull," for example); books that impressed me and I wanted to keep around (like Jane Jacobs's "Life and Death of American Cities," or Anton Myrer's "Once An Eagle"; books that were classics and might be worth re-reading (Dickens? Faulkner?). 

Besides, some books don't lend themselves well to the electronic format.  Cookbooks, for example - we'll dump some we haven't found useful, but recipes on a computer screen just aren't very functional.   Reference works, or anything with a lot of illustrations - these don't "translate" well onto an e-reader screen. 

So, it's always sad to cut off a friend, but some of these tomes were like the people you once knew, with whom contact dwindled over the years to a Christmas card, then to a Christmas card with no news (just a signature); and you knew it could only go downhill from there.  Similarly, there were lots of volumes that hadn't spoken to me in a long while; others that I enjoyed, but knew I'd never revisit; and far, far too many that sounded great when I purchased them, yet I hadn't read (and now they seemed passé).

The upshot was that we've managed to find about 250 books that we can send to a new home somewhere.  That hardly puts a dent in the mass (it might equate to one empty bookcase, that will be quickly filled by other books that are in cartons or in piles, waiting their turn at a shelf), but it's a satisfying start. We may miss some of these friends a little bit, but we weren't getting anything out of the relationship.

The Serpentine Nature Of Big Oil Ads

I've probably written more than once about the ad campaigns run by a group called "The People Of America's Oil And Gas Industry," which appear almost continuously on television and in other media.  They stopped for a few months after the Gulf oil spill, when presumably they couldn't think of anything to say, but they're back now, on an familiar refrain:  "Don't tax us!"  I've always been amazed how the "people" of the industry seem to be able not only to come up with the big bucks for incessant big-ticket advertising, but are willing to put their "personal" money on the line to bring us these messages.  Oh well.

Some companies, I notice, are also doing their own advertising, most of them attempting to put on a friendly "green" face.  Let's take Chevron, for example, which is running a campaign under the slogan "We Agree."   One example:  Dangerous, radical-looking guy says "oil companies should put their profits to good use."  Clean-cut blonde Chevron engineer gal says, "We agree."   As a generic proposition, I'm sure both consumers and the companies can agree that companies should put their profits to good use.  The devil is in the details of what constitutes "good use."

Most of us, I think, don't begrudge oil companies a "fair" profit, though concepts of what's "fair" might be miles apart.  But Chevron, in its effort to get green, goes way overboard, trying to convince us, as the blonde says, that when it comes to profits, "every penny and more went to bringing more energy to the world."  Really?  Stockholders must be pretty peeved about that!  What a ridiculous statement!  I guess they think no one is truly listening.

In the same segment, the Chevron spokeswoman says that Chevron "pumped 21 million into local economies."  Per year? Per decade? She doesn't say.  It sounds pretty good, if you don't think too much about it.  Of course the profits of any company may surge in one year, drop off in another, but it's generally accepted that the big oil companies are now having exceptionally high returns.  A quick google shows that even a year ago, Chevron's estimated profits for the second quarter of 2010 were $5.4 billion, or presumably about $21 or 22 billion for the year.  By this rough estimate, Chevron's largesse, showered down on local economies, amounts to .095 percent of its profits -- that's not 9 percent, not nine-tenths of 1 percent, but less than one-hundredth of one percent.  So excuse me while I stifle a long yawn at this claim.  Use the moment, if you like, to check my math, I'm no Einstein, but I think the order of magnitude is clear.

I suppose it's a step forward to have oil companies even trying to persuade us that they're going green, and putting their profits to good use, and the like.  To some (very limited) extent, they are.  21 million is, as my dad used to say, "better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick."   But the reality is far from the claim.  Maybe they could do better if they'd reduce their snake oil budget and use what they're spending on PR for those "good uses" they like to talk about.    

Eating Right - The Mozzarella Madness

Making a pizza at home has certainly come a long way from the days when (unless you were part of an Italian-American family, perhaps) you would probably go buy a box that contained a tiny can of indifferent tomato sauce, maybe another tiny can of grated mystery cheese, and a sack of flour and other dry ingredients that, with the addition of water and oil (?) would become the crust.  And what a crust it was!  You were supposed to stretch, spread, or otherwise torture this very sticky, unmanageable substance, no more than a cup in volume, as I recall, all the way across a pretty large cookie sheet.  When the "pizza" was baked, it would come out like a cracker - a very hard, tooth-shattering cracker that had a lot in common with those rock-hard German cookies called "springerle" except that it wasn't sweet.  (The tomato sauce was, though!)

Anyway, now we have better options, though they're still not perfect.  Take the ubiquitous Boboli crust, for example.  It's passable, if you're in a hurry or can't make your own from scratch, but more often than not it, too, turns out either flaccid (if you don't cook it long enough) or unpleasantly hard and dry.  But I admit to using them anyway, relying on the ingredients to make up for the shortcomings of the crust. 

 
Here's a photo I took yesterday.  I had a tomato sauce cooking, and these were the drop-ons -- some sliced green olives, some raw onion, a bit of pepperoni, an orange bell pepper, a couple of pickled pepperoncini.   And what, you ask, is that mass in the middle?  Wet toilet paper?  Insulation from the attic?  No, though either of those things might have more taste.  Actually, the white substance is "mozzarella," the plain, bright white, tasteless, rubbery, Wisconsin kind that is often the only sort you can find in many supermarkets, despite the proliferation of "gourmet" deli sections.  The one quality this cheese has is that under heat, its turns from rubber into rubber glue.  It provides the stringy quality that Americans seem to expect in pizza. 

Yes, in a hurry, we had turned to this expedient.  But having got this far, I tasted this substance and asked myself, "why did I do this?"  We were sorry.  You will be, too, so my advice is to avoid it as we usually do.   It's true that far better cheeses, including real mozzarella made from buffalo (not bison) milk, also develop some of that stringiness.  But they also have a bit of flavor and a far better texture.   So if you must use mozzarella, get a good one, produced in Italy or maybe in just a few places in this great country; and if you can, get the buffalo milk mozzarella.

Even better is to forget the mozzarella, which even at its best is mild and uninteresting.  Just sliced and served with fresh tomatoes and basil leaves, it can be refreshing, but even there, I think there are better choices.  For your pizza, why not get any good cheese you like - we use goat cheese, especially feta, fairly often, but a slightly smelly soft cheese will work nicely (try raclette), and so will a nice rich blue cheese, or a grated hard cheese like pecorino.  Oh, and by the way, some very good pizzas can be made without ANY cheese.

I'm not a calorie-counter, I confess.  And I don't worry much about food being "organic," or chemical-free.  Ultimately, the watchword for me is to use good ingredients, where they can make a difference -- ingredients that have both food value and flavor.  Why do we let ourselves be sold stuff like the "milk, vinegar, and enzymes" concoction pictured above?     

White Sidewall Tires

Today when I finally had to face the fact I needed new tires for the car, I jokingly said to my wife, "hey, let's get some white sidewalls!"  

Of course I knew I hadn't owned, or even seen, those very proper tires with the clean white strips around the outer wall, for years or even decades.  But we all remember them (don't we?).  Those of us over about 50 probably do.   We may have had them on our early cars, but our parents definitely had them.   My father wouldn't have bought a car without white sidewalls, and scrubbing them free of scuffs and back to a brilliant white was a necessary part of every car wash.  He scoffed when I bought my own first new car, a 1971 Audi with plain old black tires -- they just didn't look "right" to him.

By the way, why were white sidewalls white?  Here's something I didn't even know until today.  Originally, tires were made of natural rubber which (slightly bleached from its natural cream tone) was white; but carbon black eventually was added to the tire tread to make the tires tougher, leaving the sides white.  (Read more in the linked article).

It turns out they DO still make whitewalls, though not for most current model cars (the Lincoln Town Car, reportedly, is the only exception).  They're produced by specialty companies for antique car buffs and restorationists.  In part for that reason, I suppose, nowadays just to utter the term "white sidewalls" conjures up images of white bucks, white sport coats, and pink carnations; or of bonking along the highway on one of those concrete roads laid in sections so your tires went bonk - bonk - bonk as you zipped along at 50 mph.  A part of a bygone era. 

In the late 1970s, just as white was being phased out on car tires, military men I knew seemed to be making an effort to preserve the look by transferring it to their personal wardrobes, sporting white shoes and white belts as accessories to their civvies.  Later, they transferred it to their heads as "sidewall" haircuts become popular.

Given the time that has passed, you have to wonder if white sidewall tires might be about to make a fashion comeback.  But that seems unlikely.  They were always hard to keep clean, and car manufacturers have given us more than adequate substitutes:  wheel caps with intricate designs that are even harder to keep clean.