Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
::Today's soundtrack: Bob Dorough & Friends "Schoolhouse Rocky" ::
This is something that has always made me feel like a total idiot.
I'll see a word written down and read it to myself. My only encounter with this word is written, but I encounter it many times this way for several years. I see the word in a book or article and always read it in my mind the same way. Then finally, I have occasion to actually hear the word, and I find out I have been "saying" it completely wrong for ages.
Here's an example: celebrity name Kayne West. Now, I'm not really all that into rap or hip=hop music or whatever, so my only experience with his name was when he was written about in Entertainment Weekly magazine. So I see a name like "Kayne" and HOW do I pronounce it? Like "Kane" of course! It seems pretty obvious that it was just a new way to spell Kane, which is a pretty badass name. BUT NO! I discover in passing by some television program or other, heck I don't even know what it was, a talk show or entertainment "magazine" program maybe, and I hear it at the same time as seeing it written on the screen. Kanye is pronounced "Khan-yay" for some weird reason. I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't seen the word written on the screen at the same time as hearing it said that I would NOT have made the mental connection between rap star Kayne West and odd pronunciation "Kahn-yay" West. I mean, if you want it to be "Kahn-yay", wouldn't you spell it K-A-N-Y-E (switch the N and Y around)? I felt like a fool.
I know that this happens to other people, too. I recall this one instance where I was at a friend's party making polite conversation with a friend of a friend that I didn't really know. We were talking about books and movies and I asked him what type he like the most. He said "my favourite jen-rees are..." and here I am thinking to myself "'jen-rees'?? What the hell is this guy... oh my word. He thinks 'genre' in pronounced 'jen-ree'!!" And yes, I actually did say something to him, and he actually did explain that he had only ever seen it written down and never heard it out loud.
And you know what? The "opposite" is true as well. I mean, if you've only ever HEARD a word, you may find it confusing to write down the first time. As a random example, the word "schedule." The way we silly Americans pronounce it as "skedule" can make it understandably misleading to spell. Now, if we all said it like British people "shedule" it is LESS confounding. I mean, never mind words with silent letters like "knee", "phlegm", and "psychopath." Spelling word like that based on how they sound would send you in the wrong direction! Curse you, Latin and Greek word origins!
I really think it's time to start evolving English so that words are spelled like they sound. In this new utopia, knee=nee, phlegm=flem, psychopath=saikopath, genre=jonruh, and Kayne=Kahnyay (but you can pronounce them both as "arrogant jerk"). Simple. Straightforward. I think this would save all of us some embarrassing moments, don't you?
William the Bloody (pronouncement)
