Missing the Point
And the bigger picture.
This morning, as usual, my hubby watched his fave show, Sunday Morning. That’s when I leave to make coffee and return only to deliver his cup, having no interest in “unbiased” political commentary, since November 2016, including Sunday Morning’s.
But today, knowing my passion for language, my hubby shouted for me to watch a special feature. It was a cute animation explaining the amazing phonomena of how many two-word idioms start with a word containing ‘i’ followed by a word containing ‘a’.
The dozens of examples included wishy washy, dilly dally, etc.
With an eye roll, I waited for the brilliant conclusion that explained the phonomenon.
Humans are…LAZY…?
More specifically, the human tongue doesn’t like words containing ‘a’ or ‘u’ as much as words containing ‘i’.
Talk about lazy. This reporter completely missed the point.
It’s PHONETICS.
Phonetics is the reason words like Worcestershire are pronounced wu·stuh·shr. Human pronunciation is all about efficiency and euphony.
While my undergraduate degree is in French, and I am considered a published author and reporter, I do NOT have a degree in Phonetics. However, during my seven years working in Paris, I made a living partly by teaching English to businessmen (yes, men) and also coaching American English to professional actors.
The acting school where I coached did provide some training, basically instructors were taught to find similar sounding words, to help the actor pronounce American English.
On the surrealist comedy film, Dark At Noon, I spent two months in Portugal shooting alongside brilliant English actors John Hurt and David Warner (who studied together at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and were like silly brothers who kept me doubled over in laughter), as well as the very sweet French actor Daniel Prévost.
Daniel was playing a Priest, or Curé in French, and, in a scene speaking from a balcony, he was struggling with the line “Wake up!” He took me aside and pleaded for me to help him with the pronunciation, which for the French, is very awkward.
In two seconds I solved his problem. I wrote down two English words for a visual:
Way cup!
He tried it and was amazed at how easily it worked.
The point being, how could this cute little Sunday Morning production, which clearly took quite a bit of effort to produce, not have stepped back to get the bigger picture? The story of phonetics is even more interesting that the one little point they made.
There are several wonderful linguists that I follow on Substack, Kate Morgan Reade Emma Gannon and I would love your feedback on this.
P.S. Let me take this opportunity to remind Americans to WAKE UP! and #VoteBlue2024!!
Brilliant Lorraine! ‘Way cup’ should be printed on blue t-shirts. Love it:)
Now back to my French Duolingo. I can’t go to Cordon Bleu Vegan without speaking ‘some.’
Hubby watches the same show and I saw this piece - I speak English - several different ways- a little bit of “Street Spanish” ( once was much better but have not used it since I moved east back then) I know alphabetical sign language, but English - I grew up in the south with ya’ll, all ya’ll, the Lazy way to me to speak English was my southern accent. I used ta could, innit (isn’t it) and all words ending in ing - drop the g! Then I was in the northern part of the country - that meant every sentence was a question, with the voice going up at the end of a sentence. I did not pick up a lot of the “Yankee” speak as there were phrases I just could hear properly etc. California is what mostly stole a lot of my Southern speak. Everyone from there spoke really fast - after spending most of my life speaking slowly and every word had extra syllables it meant I mostly spoke southern with a faster speed ….. yikes! Then Arizona, but with a partner/hubby from Hawaii. Ending a lot of sentences with “yeah” & plenty being the word for a LOT - I had plenty changes on that front.
All of that being said I have always loved language. Figuring out the meaning of words from a prefix or a suffix, knowing the derivation of words- being offended when Your was used instead of You’re, there, their, there and all of those words that meant so many different things irritated the living daylights out of me, YEAH? The pidgin from a Hawaiian hubby pretty much let me relax. Although today someone wrote your in a message instead of you’re and my brain wanted to correct her.
There was a time spelling was a biggy. Now because of my misshapen hands I have a lot of spelling mistakes, punctuation has gone to hell and because of the combo of a lot of states. I do well to get my point across without people thinking I’m uneducated. But I Reckon I do awright in most of the American state, at least onct in a while.
Bravo for the places you taught & how fun some of those places must have been!!
I was not at all happy with the “lazy” definition either - not one damned BIT!!