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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Sometimes words are a mouthful
YOU SAY toe-MAY-toe, I say toe-MAH-toe, you say poe-TAY-toe, I say poe-TAH-toe ... What the hell's wrong with you?
I was pondering the annoying nuances pronunciation recently while emceeing the Blood Bank of Hawaii's annual luncheon to honor a few hundred of the state's top blood-givers. For one thing, how come "pronunciation" isn't pronounced "pro-NOUNCE-ee-ation"? What kind of a language is it when the word "pronunciation" is so hard to pronounce?
The word I was having a devil of a time pronunciating at the Blood Bank lunch was "apheresis." If I hadn't just written a long column about blood donation, I wouldn't have known that "apheresis" is the process of taking blood from a donor, removing the platelets and then returning the blood to the donor.
Writing apheresis is one thing, pronouncing it is another. So I went on the Internet and found a Web site that offered an audio pronunciation. The man said -- and I swear -- "ah-FAIR-uh-sis."
So that's the way I pronounced it, adding a lame joke that I thought apheresis was the Greek god of Ferris wheels. (Groan.)
It turns out that everyone in the room pronounced the word "ah-fer-EEEE-sis."
So we got into a big argument, and I ended up breaking down weeping and leaving the stage in a huff.
Actually, I stayed up there, continued to say it my way and said if they wanted someone who could pronunciate, not to mention enunciate (pronunciate's excitable younger cousin), they should have gotten TV anchor Leslie Wilcox. I write words, damn it, not pronounce them.
TO BE HONEST, the audience was nice and my hosts treated me gently, the way one might treat a boy of 3 or 4. But the event reminded me why I got into journalism, mainly because I can't speak. Writing easy, talking hard.
I remembered that when I was 5 years old and living in Morocco; we had a yard dude named Mohammed who taught me to count to 10 in Arabic. (Why we had a yard dude in the Sahara Desert, I don't know.)
To this day, I was sure I could still count to 10 in Arabic. But what if I couldn't? What if all these years I've been saying "wahid, ithnan, thalatha" (one, two, three) when the rest of the Arab world was saying "toe-MAH-toe"? So I went on the Internet and found a site that had audio files of Arab counting, and I found I was still saying it correctly. At least, according to the same voice that said "ah-FAIR-uh-sis."
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail
cmemminger@starbulletin.com