This Month's Story
Oh well, if the heat don’t get cha, then the humility will.
Gutten Nabben, 1925
I’m sitting having coffee with John and we are discussing how we mispronounce things and how they often reflect the wrong way to our listeners. Mostly, if the way we misspeak a word our mistake is a derivative of a poor education.
Not always. I had a friend once who wrote for a newspaper. Her problem was that she could not pronounce ‘eagle’, she always said, ‘igel’. This came to a head one time when she had interview the naturalist at a bald eagle conservatory. She tried not to use the word at all during the interview, but the one or two times she did, the naturalist sort of paused and then went on to answer her question. She said she cried all the way home from the interview. She said what was really humiliating was that he was so polite about it.
People are not so polite. During my work in Europe, I had to speak Spanish, Italian and French. I spoke none of these very well, but to the Italians and the Spanish it didn’t seem to matter. Since my accent in Italian was Spanish, they understood me and didn’t care. In Spain, they always thought I was from someplace north of Madrid and, therefore, couldn’t help myself. The French however were another problem and since this is a family newspaper I will not go into my language adventures in France. May they all boil in their own garlic.
But it is mispronunciations in the US that John and I were discussing and let’s stick to that. John mentioned his first catechism lesson.
“I was told I had to memorize a lot of things in a question and answer format. One I remember was, ‘Q: Who is God?’ ’A: God is the supreme being who created all things.’ Well my parents never used words like supreme or being so for a long time I thought that God was a string bean. I had the idea of a big green string bean in the sky. Heck, I was only 5 year old, I was OK with that.
“Another thing was that at the beginning of “Superman” the announcer would say that Superman had powers far above those of mortal men. I thought he said bortle men; I asked my mother what bortle was and tried to look up bortle in the dictionary but I couldn’t solve the problem for years.”
I then told John of my desire as a college student to grow above my lower eastside heritage or at least broaden my stodgy engineering course work, I took a class in world literature taught by a well-known professor whose name I have mercifully forgotten.
I spent one long weekend reading Faust and fell in love with the story’s wonderful sense of drama (I have since found it a little heavy but in those days I was very young). The next day I stood in line after class while the professor’s loving students slobbered on him. Finally, I managed to mention to him about the surprise my reading of Goethe had been to me. (I pronounced it Goethe, I had never heard of him before and the book was not due to be discussed in class for another week, and so said his name as I read it). He looked at me for all of ten seconds and then, without saying a word, turned to another fawning student.
I stood stupid, not knowing what had happened except I had been snubbed and people were looking at me with undisguised pity. Then a voice behind me whispered “its ‘gerta’“. I turned to a young serous looking girl. “Who is Gerta?” “Its not pronounced ‘Goth,’ it’s pronounced ‘Gerta’“ I turned and took a long look at the pompous idiot who was supposed to be educating me. I swore vengeance.
Later in the course, we read Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The professor started the class session with a long round of allegoric garbage that included “Don Quickcet” (pronounced like the concrete mix) every other word. I finally raised my hand and left it up
Finally he paused and nodded to me. “Sir, do you mean Don Quixote?” I asked.
“It’s pronounced Don “Quickcet”, Mr. La Violette.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir. I’m confused. You see when my Spanish grandmother read me Don ‘Quickcet’ when I was a small boy she always mispronounced it Don Quixote”
Some day I will tell you about my spizgetty (spaghetti) story. Until then, Gotten Tag
