I Want To Eat Lunch, Not Play Golf

As I age, I find myself increasingly distressed by people (who should know better) who mispronounce words. This despite the fact that I'm not perfect. "Poinsettia" always gives me trouble. I was raised to say "Poinsett-a," and for a long time thought it was an acceptable regional variant. "Poinsett-i-a" is correct, but so many say it the other way that I feel like a pretender or a snob if I say it correctly. But saying it wrong (i.e., according to habit) doesn't feel right, either. So I tend to avoid saying it at all. When I must say it, I tend to slide a "y" sound in the middle: "Poinsett-ya." Not pretty; not elegant; but workable. I hope.

Anyway, the current Wendy's ad wherein an animated Wendy says she doesn't like "gray areas" in her chicken is bugging the heck out of me. She also says "sand-wedge" instead of "sand-wich." She may not want any gray areas in her chicken sandwich, but I sure don't want to clamp my teeth down on a golf club in the middle of mine!

I'm not sure why it irritates me so much. Maybe it's because I tend to equate pronunciation laziness with mental laziness. This is the same reason that when otherwise intelligent, educated people like Keith Olbermann say "li-berry" instead of "li-brary," I go through the roof. It's worse than fingernails scraping a blackboard. It's worse than having aluminum foil and a stainless steel fork tine hit a dental filling at the same time. It is supremely discomforting.

Which is not to say that I still won't make mistakes. But at least I know better than the sociology professor [yes, the professor--Ed.] who repeatedly in his lectures said "ep-i-tome" instead of "e-pit-o-me." Yes, it was Sociology 101, with well over 250 students in the lecture sessions, and yes, it was the fall of [gasp!--Ed] 1975, and yes, the professor obviously was well on the way to "emeritus" status . . . but still! I was 18, barely out of high school, and I knew better than a Ph.D. with several books published how to pronounce an important word. What really scares me however is that no one else seemed to notice. Either they didn't know the word or they didn't know any better, either.

Here's hoping college broadened their horizons.