Words have always been the way I earned a check, first as a teacher, then as a writer and proofreader here at the paper. So I hate to hear words mispronounced. Of course, we all bungle a word from time to time because English is the most difficult language in the world to speak. There are several reasons for this difficulty.
One reason we mispronounce words is that so many foreigners keep showing up here and leaving their words with us, but they don’t leave us with the rules for pronouncing those words.
Chic, for example, is a French word that means “stylish, sophisticated.” It is pronounced “sheek,” not “chick” like it looks. That’s because most Frenchmen have never lived on a Simpson County chicken farm.
So we say it’s chic to leave your pantyhose off and bare your legs in mid-winter, if you’re a “chick,” even if you freeze. It’s chic to work out in a gym,wear tight shorts and drink bottled water if you’re a male.
An opposite word in French which has also come over into English, is gauche. It’s pronounced “go-sh,” not “gawsh” like it looks, and it literally means “left,” as opposed to “right.” It refers to a direction (turn a gauche) as well as to doing the wrong thing, (he’s so gauche). So if you do something gauche you’ll be “left” out by the in-crowd, who are always “right.”
Gauche, then, is a fat guy in baggy shorts wearing knee high black socks with his sandals, hauling around a six-pack of Mountain Dew and chugging one down while he looks in the window of the gym at all the chic skinny guys drinking bottled water between sets of 100 pushups.
Latin is another language that influenced English and left us with many unpronounceable words. We have trouble even telling some of these words apart because the Romans, who spoke Latin, conquered the world by confusing people, making up words that sounded almost alike but meant different things.
So we get prostate confused with prostrate. Notice the addition of the “r” to that second word.
Here’s how to tell them apart. Prostate is a gland that men have that their doctors sometimes have to check with a glove, if you get my meaning. Prostrate means that you fall with your face to the ground.
Prostrate, then, is probably where you would be if that glove got hold of your prostate just right.
Another set of Latin words that Americans misuse is physical and fiscal. Remember that physical has three syllables and has to do with your body or something real, while fiscal has two syllables and has to do with money. So a physical year would be a year in which you do a lot of pushups. A fiscal year is one in which you have to account for the money you spent in a 12-month period. I’d hate to account for my own fiscal year.
And then, if you have a lot of change to count, it could be a physical fiscal year, if you own gumball machines and your intake is all in quarters. Those things are heavy to lift!
We also stumble on the Latin word corps. Despite the fact that has a p and ends in s, it is pronounced “kor” as in drum corps or the Marine Corps. Corps (kor) means a specialized group or a “body” of people too, but in a more physical (not fiscal) way. We often mix up corps with corpse, which is a dead body. A band director is happy to have a drum corps, but a funeral home would be dismayed to receive a drum corpse. What would you bury the thing in?
No wonder Latin is a dead language.
But you see what we’re up against nationally here, what with all these difficult foreign words coming into English.
On top of that, we live in a state where mispronunciation is absolutely required, if you want to fit in and not be gauche. We have better things to do than to sound out all those syllables so if a word has more than two syllables, we tend to cut one or two out and just get on with it.
We say, for example, “I’ve lived right (often pronounced “rat”) here in Miss-sippi all my life.” We say the name of our state as if it is some girl we are introducing whose name is Sippi. We don’t try to say the difficult word business either. We prefer “bidness, which you’ll have to admit is easier to get your mouth around.
We don’t spend a hundred dollars on something, we spend a hunerd. We can get our wallets out faster if we run the syllables together more smoothly.
We eat sammidges and drink co-colas too.
And to have more time for fun, we tend to leave the g off words ending in “ing.” So we say we are goin’ fishin’ and huntin.’ If you don’t pronounce the words our way, you’re probably not a hunter or a fisherman in these parts. Nobody is takin’ a greenhorn to his huntin’ club or private fishin’ spot if that joker asks to go “hunt-ing” or “fish-ing.” He obviously won’t know a cork from a cartridge.
Even though it bothers me, I guess there are times that mispronunciation works. No point in fallin’ down prostate over it all. I just need to get on with my bidness and quit worr’in’ ‘bout it. Rat?
