Talking about Words: You say, ‘spi-NOSH,’

but I say 'SPIN-itch'

With Prof. Richard W. Bailey

In a recent performance in Ann Arbor, Lily Tomlin remembered herself in the second grade—an aloof girl envied (or disliked) for her talent with books. Reading aloud to the class one day, she came to the word island.

It was her misfortune to pronounce it iss-land rather than aye-land, and she sank down into her seat amid the jeers of her classmates. She hoped they’d all move away, though she knew there wasn’t much chance of that happening. She figured she’d always be known as “the girl who said iss-land.”

Poor Lily.

English spelling is notoriously filled with pitfalls and booby-traps.

Mark Twain confronted the problem passionately in addressing the Associated Press at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, September 18, 1906. He urged the reporters and editors to simplify some of the grotesqueries of the language. “And we shall be rid of phthisis and phthisic and pneumonia and pneumatics, and diphtheria and pterodactyl, and all those other insane words which no man addicted to the simple Christian life can try to spell and not lose some of the bloom of his piety in the demoralizing attempt.”

The fact that my SpellChecker meekly swallows all but one of Twain’s hors d’oeuvres is a testimony to the deep affection we have for the odd and foreign in English. We like words odd. Who would want them simpler? Terry O’Dactill looks mighty like an Irish dinosaur.

My reflections on this subject arise from a new book I found advertised, a work by Diana Bellucci titled How to Pronounce French, German and Italian Wine Names. It struck me that this might be a useful enough exercise in lexicography since ordinary dictionaries do not systematically provide information about proper names.

Then I noticed that the book has 347 pages, and I’d bet that at the end of it Diana Bellucci declares the need for more research or additional information even before she gets on to Spanish and Portuguese.

Now it is true that some wine names are not transparent to people who have not studied the three languages mentioned in her title. Chateau neuf du pape looks as if it were designed to terrify speakers of English. Trockenbeerenauslese has a forbidding quality to the innocent monoglot, and so does Vernaccia di San Gimignano.

“I’ll have a glass of the house red,” keeps the oenophile out of pronunciation trouble. Long ago, the British simplified the task of the sommelier by reducing much of the world of wine to hock, claret and bubbly.

Still, we love a challenge. Why not just anglicize these words and have done with it?

A friend of mine, despite imploring correction from his loved ones, went to his grave describing flowerets of broccoli, dwarf carrots and fingers of celery as CREW-dites. He couldn’t see any reason why crudites should have a special pronunciation making it different from, say, Sodomites. Fortunately, he went along with the rest of us in giving two syllables to pate.

Such indifference to received opinion is rare in the world of English pronunciation. It gets worse when people want to make things even more foreign than they already are. The person who says Paree for Paris is, we assume, making a joke. We hope the person is joking who calls the Target store: tar-ZHAY. But what about the person who gives a guttural breathy –ich to the city of Munich? Germans call the place M ünchen. We call the person who says MEW-nish a phony.

Within English, there are national differences, too. We call the one-eared Dutch impressionist Van Go while the British say Van Gock. They don’t pronounce the last t in trait; they let people know this is a “foreign” word. On the other hand, they call the port city in “The French Connection”: mar-SAILS.

It’s one thing to make things sound less foreign than they should; it’s another to make them too foreign.

Panache sounds just fine as puh-NAH-shh; spinach is ridiculous when pronounced spi-NOSH.

Richard W. Bailey is the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English. His most recent book is Rogue Scholar: The Sinister Life and Celebrated Death of Edward H. Rulloff, University of Michigan Press, 2003—a biography of an American thief, impostor, murderer and would-be philologist who lived from 1821 to1871. It was published by the University of Michigan Press in August.

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