About the only thing my folks brought with them when we moved to California was their accents. We kids brought ours too. “Can we all borrow ay catsup bottle from you all,” Peggy Ann asked our new next door neighbor Aunt Marty who lived with Uncle Hugh and their four boys and a Persian Blue. They were not our real aunt or uncle but we had many real ones but we would never know them. Ray called Mom Patty, but her real name was Mary, and Aunt Marty and Uncle Hugh called Ray, John. Uncle Hugh and Aunt Marty and their four boys and Persian Blue cat that used to sit atop the wall and stare into our bedroom moved away. The new neighbor mom Pennye’s real name was Mary too. When we first got Out West I went to public school, put ahead a grade, even though I’d never went to kindergarten, because the LA kids were slower. I remember sitting in class another kid reading aloud and I waited for the teacher to come down on him because he was saying his ay’s wrong. He said a cat with a soft article a, short and not at all sleek. It came my turn to read and I gave ay cat a hard ay, as long and hard and wiry as a cat’s tail when it’s a bottlebrush, and was astonished to hear the teacher interrupt me and correct my pronunciation of ay. Gradually we older kids lost most of our hard a’s and other quirks but the foibles of pronunciation still fool my tongue, like pass the catsup, and I wonder how his little tale might be changed had the author of my second grade book said the cat instead of a cat.
Tag: pronunciation
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Pronunciation Checker
What do you do when you hear a snobbish correction of someone’s pronunciation, and of a word you know both pronunciations in question to be acceptable in standard usage? You don’t want to snub the snob, yourself becoming a snob, but neither do you want any damage to go unrepaired. Worse, the situation where the corrector pretends not to recognize the thing the mispronounced word refers to. What can be more pretentious?
As we age, do we grow less tolerant of one another’s foibles, and chop for the weakest part of their blade to snap in half?
There’s the person who when a youngster carries a mean streak. As they age, they may sublimate that mean desire into some other equally strained habit, like correcting malapropisms or mispronunciations every chance they get, pretending to be helpful when actually drawing the shame sword from its sheath.
I readily admit, and anyway the prescient reader will already suspect, that my own articulations, enunciations, and right pronunciations often run afoul of the standards of others.
So much so, in fact, that I was encouraged and felt all is not lost when I saw the following quote from the poet Diane Suess, a finalist for the 2024 National Book award for poetry:
“You have to be willing to self-educate at a moment’s notice, and to be caught in your ignorance by people who will use it against you. You will mispronounce words in front of a crowd. It cannot be avoided.”
“My Education,” from “Modern Poetry,” 2024, by Diane Suess.
The first thing we do when we’re not sure of a right pronunciation is to break down the syllables and pronounce them phonetically. But that doesn’t always work. I once pronounced, to a professor no less, the poet Arthur Rimbaud’s name wrong. I said rim bawd, instead of ram boh. The professor pretended not to know the poet I was referring to. She even later repeated in an anecdote form my mistake in front of the whole class. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
Neither do I know how to pronounce the poet Diane Seuss’s last name. Is it Seus like Zeus, my first guess, or is it Zoice, rhyming with Voice, or Soice, a variant of Sauce – as the story goes, apparently most everyone mispronounced the famed Dr. Seuss’s name, so often that the mispronunciation became the right pronunciation, and if you pronounce it correctly, you’ll likely be corrected.
My father was, as he put it, “hard on hearing.” When he was three years old, he came down with scarlet fever, which caused sensorineural hearing loss. His ears drained a thick and slimy yellow-greenish kind of phlegm or mucus, filling the ear canal and dripping down the lobules. His teachers often consigned him to the back of the room, where of course he couldn’t hear anything. He developed a stutter, which magnified his mispronunciations. Later in life, after ear surgery, his stutter disappeared. Meantime, he had learned to read lips, and he was good at selective hearing. He was also a good talker, could talk to anyone, and did. He used to cup his palm around his ear and bend it forward making an ear trumpet to amplify voices, but it usually doesn’t help to yell at the hearing impaired. It’s often lack of sound clarity that’s the problem. It’s the sound frequency that must change.
Loss of hearing is not loss of sound, as victims of tinnitus know. When the ears don’t work right, the brain fills in the blanks. It’s that internal sound no one else can hear that’s called tinnitus, a symptom of something wrong with one’s hearing. Tinnitus, we were informed last summer, is pronounced ti·nuh·tuhs, not, as we were saying it, ti.night.iss. Of course, the correct pronunciation is the one the listener hears without issue and lets the conversation move on. And what’s the point of being right when no one else is?
A truly miscreant corrector like the one referenced in paragraph one above might then ask the poor pronouncer to spell the thing in question, thus pulling out a dagger of humiliation to accompany the sword of shame, but even a correct spelling will do little to clarify or solve what is to begin with a faked miscommunication.
I’m not an expert speller, either, by the way, but we’ll save that issue for another day.
Sounds can be errie, and we build our exotic or occult vocabularies in aeries at the tops of cliffs and the tallest of trees. Our vocabularies become nests of familiarity, even if no one else espies them. But there’s a difference between hearing and listening, and if I’m a poor pronouncer of words, I don’t think I can blame it on my hearing. But pronunciation is, I think, physical, and not mental in any intellectual sense. Or is being smart (if accurate pronunciation is indeed a sign of smartness) actually a physical thing? I don’t know. Maybe it is. You might have trouble pronouncing a word correctly like you have trouble rubbing your stomach while patting your head simultaneously. In any case, we have to hear something correctly before we can repeat it correctly – does that sound right?
The Coming of the Toads 