Dr. Frank's What's-it

Word Pronunciation Football, Part II

Deliberately mispronouncing someone's name, or pretending you don't remember it, is a time-honored method of casting aspersions or belittling someone.

Every girlfriend I've ever had has had snide little nicknames for all of the previous girlfriends she's known about, often involving pointed or creative punning mispronunciation, e.g. "Swillian" instead of Jillian, "Scary-ann" for Mary-ann, "Flat-chest-a" for Francesca, "La Sleeze" instead of Louise, etc. (The girlfriend of this one guy I used to know would always pronounce the name of his ex-wife Sharon so that it sounded like the name of a prominent Israeli politician-- which was actually pretty funny, as such things go.)

It doesn't have to be a pun. Sometimes it can be a simple, consistent mispronunciation. Example: "Schmelanie" was one girlfriend's habitual way of referring to ex-girlfriend Melanie-- I believe it was a shortened form of an original *"Melanie Schmelanie" (the asterisk indicating that this form is unattested, but rather a reasonable inference about an ur-slur lost in antiquity.) Another common variant is simply pretending to forget the name: "what was her name again? Beryl? Meryl? Darrell? Clairol?" "Carol, honey, it was Carol." "Yeah, whatever..."

This phenomenon crops up in pop-culture all time. Aunt Dahlia refers to Bertie's friend Gussie Fink-Nottle as "Spink-bottle"; Carol Brady's old boyfriend keeps calling Mike "Mac"; Endora can't remember that Darren's name isn't "Derwood." And so on. The message is: "this person is so insignificant or objectionable that I can't even be bothered to remember the name or pronounce it correctly." It happens in your life. It happens on TV. And it happens in politics.

There's another angle to this pronunciation game. Mispronunciation of foreign words appears to be a more or less significant part of British linguistic culture. Words borrowed from foreign languages are often pronounced any which way except the way they are pronounced in their land of origin. "Macho" is "match-o." Nicaragua is "Knicker-RAG-you-a." I believe this is along the lines of the girlfriend mispronunciation gambit outlined above: it's a subtle way of underscoring the importance of your own language and culture by demonstrating that you don't give a monkey's (as they say) for how you pronounce any other language's words.

(Of course, in the US, and especially in my native California, we go out of our way to try to pronounce words of foreign derivation not only in what we think the foreign pronunciation might be, but also in what we imagine the foreign accent might sound like. This is similarly revealing, I'm sure, and often just as inadvertently amusing. In certain circles, it is a social requirement that you show your respect and deference for La Raza by pronouncing all words of Spanish derivation in a kind of Chico and the Man accent. Speaking of "Nicaragua," I don't move in those circles, and I've never quite been able to master it. It's something like "Ni-hah-rrr-OW-oo-wah." Oops, there I'm doing it...)

Anyway, I'm sure that's at least part of what's going on with Christopher Hitchens's BBC buddies, the ones who can't seem to figure out how to pronounce Wolfowitz. They disapprove of him, and failing to pronounce his name correctly is a perfectly commonplace and acceptable, if immature, way of expressing it.

Except, course, that there is a long, ignominious European tradition of ridiculing and denigrating Jews by exaggerating and caricaturing ethnic/linguistic traits and habits; and that this tradition not so long ago culminated in, and was exemplified in the propaganda of, the most notorious, the most evil political culture and ideology ever seen; and that such propaganda accompanied and helped to facilitate mass murder on such a scale that a new word had to be coined with which to refer to it. Perhaps the journalists in question are unaware: people are still pretty upset about this.

So here's some advice for harried, benefit of the doubt-wielding anti-Wolfowitzian journalists whose criticism of Wolfowitz isn't necessarily anti-Semitic: if you're going to play the mispronunciation card when trying to indicate your disapproval of a Jew whilst you wonder aloud whether or not he and his cabal might be pulling the strings behind the scenes, it's not a good idea to do so in a faux-Yiddish accent. It's just not. Comedians can, perhaps, get away with it; journalists can't. Even if you don't mean it that way, it doesn't make you look too good; it tends to put you in pretty disagreeable company. People will wonder why you seem to be going out of your way to make an issue of the man's Jewishness, and in such a well-worn classically anti-Semitic manner, even if that's not what you believe you're trying to do.

This is the question that comes up so often when reading anecdotes like Hitchens's or this or that article in the New Statesman, etc.: do they not realize how bad it sounds, or do they realize and not care?

Posted by Dr. Frank at June 17, 2003 09:25 AM | TrackBack