How do you say it?

Phil Plait posted a tongue-in-cheek entry on Bad Astronomy about the proper pronunciation of the word "kilometer."* This put me in mind of an article I read in the September 1999 issue of Astronomy magazine - apparently "The Art of Skyspeak" by Bob Berman. Or maybe not. Bob Berman is something of a populist when it comes to astronomy, the very opposite of a snob, and this article was very snobbish when it came to the proper pronunciations of stars like Vega and Betelgeuse. As I said on Phil Plait's site and on this entry on AstroGuyz.com, I don't really care how people pronounce these things, as long as they're talking about 'em! Besides, I doubt anybody gets all the details on pronouncing ancient Arabic words exactly right.

This also got me thinking about some other stuff. When I was at Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences back in 1984, our Organic Chemistry professor (I forget his name) would always stress to us the importance of "woRshing" our glassware at the end of the lab. It was the first time I had ever heard the word pronounced "woRsh" (emphasis on the hard yet nonexistent "R"), but not the last. I assumed this was a regional pronunciation, possibly from Pittsburgh, but I have a local friend who says the same thing, even in the context of "WoRshington". I also have friends in New Jersey who speak of buying cabinets with "draws" in them (what we know as "drawers"), and local friends who laugh at me when I speak of washing "clothes" instead of "cloes".

Today I caught a bit of an NPR report about a tiny community somewhere in the Appalachian South that was entirely dependent on Federal subsidies for growing tobacco. When these subsidies went away, the community was faced with an economic crisis: no one had any work skills that didn't involve tobacco agriculture. The bottom line is, the community got itself online and learned all about computers and the Internet.

My problem with this report comes at the end, when the woman doing most of the talking to the NPR reporter refers to "BRAW-bah" (second "a" pronounced like "pants") connections. Sorry, hon; you haven't even owned this word for five years. That's hardly long enough for you to slur your pronunciation. It's "broadband".

So are there any pronunciations that drive you up the wall? Others that you're willing to live with? And where do you draw the line?



*If it seems like I'm citing Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy a lot lately, maybe it's because it's one of the few blogs I link to that's getting updated regularly. There are others. Gort is automatically putting up a daily post even while he's on vacation (which makes me suddenly wish he had a post scheduled that said "OMG, can you believe the stupidity that came out of Dubya's mouth today?! ROFL!" - which would probably apply whatever day it appeared.) The Comics Curmudgeon continues at full speed, though I am now several billion comments behind and could never possibly catch up.