~ a column by Colleen O’Brien
Mispronouncing words, using incorrect grammar, spelling everything wrong, wondering which word we’re supposed to use that sounds like two other words– this is life in the English language.
That our language is, in general, fun to play with because it is complicated and rule-bound is the good part. Tackling problems and breaking the rules is so American.
Maybe the French have as much trouble with their language as we do, because French seems idiomatic, like ours. But the French are not at ease, as are we, in allowing strangers into their lexicon. We let in worlds like yacht, pronounced yeah-chet when I was eight; along with depot, pronounced dee-pot, at about the same age. Our American English is like our favorite ideas of our country itself – we (some of “we”) want democracy for everyone, including the strangers among us; we are gregarious and welcoming; we are okay with flouting rules. If we mispronounce, misspell or misplace your name, well, it all started at Ellis Island, and new country/new name is ancestry to many of us.
My writer friend of many years, Mary Plotkin, pronounced the word “prejudiced” as “pre-juiced.” I asked her what she thought it meant. “Well, I know exactly what it means, Colleen. Pronunciation has nothing to do with what one knows!”
Touche’. She was a little like Humpty Dumpty when he said to Alice in “Through the Looking Glass,” “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. . . .”
Mary Plotkin also said “MYZ-uld” for the word “misled.” I didn’t bother to ask if she knew what it meant.
Mary wanted to go into the writing biz with me when I wrote under my married name of “Clopton.” She suggested our letterhead read “Plotkin and Clopton” This thankfully never happened.
Pop songs, their titles and lyrics, even their group players, have often myzeld me: the group called Hall and Oats was known to me as “Haulin’ Oats.” The line “He’s a rhinestone cowboy” came out in my singing of the song as “He’s a right-strong cowboy.” Did I not know that the name of the song itself was “Rhinestone Cowboy”? In the ABBA song ‘Take a Chance on Me,” the lyrics don’t read “Olley olley oxen free,” but they sound like it.
This American English is not an easy language to speak, spell or hear. That we communicate as well as we do is a miracle of democratic thinking in itself. That anyone who doesn’t learn it from birth ever learns it at all impresses me. So many of us who have never hung around another language have a hard time with such daily fare as “whom.” I was out of school myself that day.
My friend Kathy sat in her car waiting for her kids inside the Fareway grocery store when she had a brainstorm about that sign. “Fareway,” she murmured. “It could be pronounced ‘far away.’” Since that day, the grocery store that moved out of town beyond the tracks has been called just that, the Far Away. But she comes from a family that calls cucumbers “cute numbers,” so she’s apt to see words afresh.
Deep into a novel, I read this: “He sat down for the longest time, his painful old back in-juries acting up. . . .” “. . . . old back IN JURIES”? I re-read it several times wondering what “back in juries” meant in the context of the story. I finally got it that there was a hyphen, and the word was “back injuries,” not “back in juries.” I moved on.
A classmate of mine circa second grade or so thought the breakfast he ate was “a negg,” not “an egg.” Until the teacher got it on paper for him, he was perplexed by her insistence that he say it the way she said it. Poor young Mike thought he was.
My sophomore roommate pronounced “intricacies” as “intrickasees,” and Sister Mary Agneda, who we called Sister Mary Agenda, did not laugh nearly as hard as we did.
The Brits think we have ruined their lovely language, but really, they speak funny. For “renaissance” (REN-uh-zaunts), they say “ren-AY-saunts.” They say – and spell — “aluminium” rather than “aluminum.” They say “Sinjins” for “Saint James” and “Wooster” for “Worcestershire.” We hardly ever know what they’re talking about.
Our American English will adopt unto itself any word from any place. It is the true beauty of our language that we are so willing to absorb and then share, even though often we do damage to the original pronunciations, particularly of places. The famous Milan in Italy, pronounced “Meh-LAWN” by the Milanese is pronounced “MY-lun” in the town of Milan, Ohio. In Nevada — a problem name itself, being Nuh-VAY-duh in the burg next to Ames, IA; Nuh-VAD-uh in the state itself; and Nuh-VAUH-duh if you’re a weatherperson on TV – there is a town called Gen-OH-uh rather that GEN-o-uh, as it is in its native Italia.
But here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, a million of these solecisms happen to us and by us all day long, from sea to shining sea. Oh freedom of speech, we adore you.
