PRO-NUN-SEE-AY-SHUN

It can be rather too easy to get hung up about a little thing like pronunciation (I say it with a “nun” in the middle… or occasionally as in the original Italian: Pro-nun-see-at-see-own-ee), but recently my days have tended to be accompanied either by Radio 4 or by audio books, so it tends to creep into the consciousness every once in a while because when a word just sounds wrong to you, it can quite knock you out of the story, like a straight six over the pavilion, and you can totally lose the thread of where you were.

The other day, I was on the final disc of a story which I’d been listening to one disc per day, when, out of the blue, the actor who was obviously highly trained in the art of speaking, suddenly said a word that I knew one way in a completely different way and, instead of listening to the rest of the chapter unfolding, I spent several minutes thinking about that instead.

Ironically, given the nature of what I write about myself, that word was “Twaddle” which I always supposed to have an “o” sound in it, more like “twoddle”, but he read as having a flat “a” (as in “paddle”) which is how it’s spelt but just sounded wrong to my ears. I did wonder whether it was simply a word he’d never come across before, but, being as he was an actor, I had my doubts.

When I was a youngster and learning to read, any word that came as a surprise to me or just appeared to be unfamiliar was one that you could occasionally trip over, which was always a worry during those strange reading tests we used to have to do (I seem to recall stumbling over the “bosom of Abraham” - I thought it was “bosun” - during one of these, but it was a long time ago and I like to think that I’ve got past it now…) but, over the years you learn to look out for the traps and, after a few embarrassing experiences, you learn how to cope when you find that you are perfectly capable of being unexpectedly hauled out of your other teenage nonsense and expected to read passages out in front of the entire school during assembly. If people still wonder why I hate any form of public speaking, just ponder on that little image for a while.

But you can never really escape the potential terrors that saying something the wrong way, and out loud, can bring. I sat through so many play readings and auditions a few years ago where I began to wonder whether anyone was actually ever taught to read words as they are supposed to sound any more, and yet I was probably being far too harsh. I remember a time when I really was old enough to know better when I was dashing across a car park, chatting away and brought us all to a standstill by saying “Well that is the epitome of good taste” and pronounced it “Eppy-tome” instead of “E-pit-o-mee”.

I can still feel the shame.

I should really have known better, really, as classical literature is full of those particular sand traps. You only have to think of Persephone (“Per-seff-o-nee” not “Percy-Fone” - another public faux pas, I’m afraid...) to know how tricky these things can be. There are so many words that can be troublesome and trip us the unwary. It is a Restaurateur (no “n”) who runs a Restaurant, although now it can be written both with and without the “n” just to confuse things further. I once had a huge row one evening with someone who just completely refused to believe me about that particular quirk of our mutual language. Yes, that was an evening that went awry (uh-oh…) very quickly… and don’t even get me started on the whole “scone” debate…

Names can be the biggest minefield. For many of my younger years I believed that the James Bond  that featured in “Dr No” was played by a man called “Seen” and, even now when I look back on my schooldays, my memory of the “boy most likely to end up being a rock star” is that he was called “Seen Canning”. I imagine I made many a tiresome schoolboy joke about the fact that I had, in fact, not seen him at all. Ha, bloody ha!

Sometimes I’m amazed that I survived secondary school at all.

Such things obviously troubled me from an early age. I noticed in one of my old catalogues which I mentioned recently that I had split up the name “Penelope” into its various syllables so that I would remember that it was “Pen-e-low-pee” and not “Penny-Lowp”. There’s a very funny scene (or seen) in one of those long-forgotten short “Rik Mayall presents…” films that the eponymous one made for ITV back when his career was skyrocketing like so many do. In the film, he had gone back to a girl’s flat and forgotten her name, so whilst she was out of the room he managed to find an envelope addressed to her only to be met with the enigmatically confusing possibilities that “Siobhan” offered. See-ob-hann…? See-o-bann…? The comic possibilities were endless…

Well, it was a long time ago, but it does offer that slightly troublesome worry in our own social interactions whenever we are finally introduced to someone whose name we’ve only ever seen written down and it’s not one we’ve come across before within our own limited experiences. My father once nearly failed to get our family passport back on a boat crossing to Italy when he failed to respond to the official calling out “Holl Mees”.

Uncle Sherlock, we thought you were better known…

Incidentally, whilst we are thinking about that, why do so many actors seem to be in absolutely everything for a while, constantly having entire (and slightly rubbish) series built around them and written for them, and then seem to suddenly disappear? Are we really that fickle? We know all about the sudden fall in the fortunes of Leslie Grantham, but what of his former “EastEnders” stablemate Nick Berry. Where are you Nick?

Anyway, for a while Rik Mayall, the people’s poet, reluctant anarchist and self-righteous toadying sycophant from “The Young Ones” was televisual hot property, and in just about every show that was going. Then he seemed to just fall off his quad bike and before you know it, pretty much off our television screens too.

Sadly, “Captain Flashheart” is featuring in beer commercials now, which has, of course, precious little to do with pronunciation, except in the sense that some of the sounds that actors say, can be very difficult to put down on paper, and  unless your readers know the sound  themselves, the point may be lost, “Right Nee-ul?” (Snorts!).

Once upon a long ago, got called a “racist” by one of my more sensitive acquaintances because I had done them the favour of printing out their essay for them for their lecturer who just happened to be Polish (and whilst we’re on matters of pronunciation, there’s a good one right there…). When I was introduced that very lecturer at a party I thought it would be terribly amusing to dryly mention that my spell checker had had some fun dealing with his name. Well, he laughed, but I can now understand why it might have been a considered less than agreeable thing to do, and in our multicultural society, I suppose we do need to make more of an effort to pronounce unfamiliar names as correctly as we can instead of just apologising for our own ignorance, although for me, the character of Andy Sipowicz  is still a tricky circle to square.

Meanwhile, I did wonder recently whether the French must be getting rather fed up of the internet, because all of those I.P. addresses really seem to object to things like punctuation marks and special characters, and certain languages like French are choc full of such punctuation marks. I only ask because I recently saw ad advert for L’Oreal and noticed that in their website address the name was written as “LOreal” and it got me thinking about whether that was another example of English suppressing another culture.

English, eh, it’s just not that easy, if you see what I mean, though it must be very tough to pick up a rough bough in Slough and thoroughly unpleasant to cough up enough dough in Loughborough.

Yikes!