Past Is Prologue
The Most Mispronounced Word in the World
And how to undo decades of linguistic carnage
Knowing or learning another language can be both a blessing and a curse. Don’t get me wrong — I think everyone should learn a foreign language, simply for the way it expands and enhances our perspective on the world, so don’t use the “curse” part as an excuse to avoid the challenge. Nevertheless, let me explain.
Let’s start with the blessings, of which there are many. Sometimes it lets you in on an inside joke, such as the one in the film Grosse Pointe Blank, in which the French hit man (played by Benny Urquidez) sent to kill Martin Blank (John Cusack) is named Felix La Poubelle. In French, la poubelle means trash can, so the inside joke is that the hit man is basically Eurotrash.
Other times it simply lets you understand the meaning of things that others can only memorize blindly. I took four years of Latin in high school, which might seem absurdly bookish or impractical, but when you hit law school and realize just how many Latin terms and phrases are still in frequent use in the legal world, knowing Latin turns out to be one of the greatest assets ever.
The down side is that, over time, you become increasingly aware of — and sensitive about — proper pronunciation. For anyone who knows French, for example, hearing Texans use the word “bookoo” (rhymes with “you two,” and meaning “a lot”) is like fingernails scratching a chalkboard once you understand that it is a pejorative perversion of the French word beaucoup. (For illustration, “bookoo bucks” means that something is expensive.)
Place names are also an excruciating challenge. Hawai’i, for example, is properly three syllables, not two, and that little apostrophe is a glottal stop representing a suppressed k (which is why the word aliki, which means “(hereditary) noble” in Tuvalu, is ali’i in Hawai’ian). So no, Hawai’i doesn’t rhyme with “a…
