N. U. I.

Sometimes when I'm having a really bad day, I can distract myself by going over to youtube and watching episodes of Groucho Marx's game show You Bet Your Life, or old Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes cartoons. (I especially love the cartoons where Bugs Bunny dresses in drag, like the hillbilly one or the opera one. Probably watching Bugs in drag as a small child is the starting point for my admiration of transvestitism.)

But what I really wanted to write about was certain types of arcane knowledge and the acquisition of said knowledge.

On the way to the gym this morning--Yes, I went!--I was talking with Kelly First and Kevin about the pronunciation of the Greek mythological creatures Scylla and Charybdis. Those names are well-nigh impossible for the uninitiated to pronounce. The only reason I can pronounce them is because I had to give a report on them in my ninth grade English class. (It wasn't much of a report, actually, seeing how Scylla and Charybdis really did nothing of any importance mythologically. I mean, they did try to take down Odysseus at one point, but their failure to do so was a foregone conclusion.)

Anyway, the impossibility of pronouncing those names reminded me of my own mispronunciations, usually of words of French origin. "Ennui," for example, I always pronounced as "N. U. I." until a woman I barely knew kind of smirked at me and said, "It's actually 'on-wee.'"

Kelly First had a similar problem with the word "patois," which is also a French word. Who looks at that and thinks it rhymes with "fatwa"?

Goddamn French. They do it on purpose, just to be difficult. I mean, I don't know how many times I have to stumble over the spelling of "hors d'oeuvre" before the French get an ass kicking from me. (Here's how I spelled it before going to the dictionary: "hor d'ourve.") Kelly First is similarly stumped by "colonel," the army rank which is pronounced like kernel of corn but which is spelled without an r. My dictionary says that "colonel" is from an obsolete French word that used to have an r in it ("coronel") and my feeling is that a) all French words deserve a similarly obsolete status, and b) who the hell ripped the r out of the word in the first place? Was it a bad transcription of a written word? What?

(I also tried to remember, during my conversation with Kelly First, the word that Ronald Reagan was so famous for mispronouncing while reading from a teleprompter. Just now, I remembered that it was "paradigm." Yes, he pronounced it "para-dij-m." Though even that slip still makes him look like a genius compared to our soon-to-be-ex simian-in-chief, George W.)

Thank god for dictionaries and spellcheck, no? Well, usually, I mean. Thank god for them usually, because most online spellcheck applications still do not recognize that "Barack Obama" is a legitimate spelling of anything.

What was I talking about? Oh, right: Arcane knowledge.

Try this on for size: Did you know that there were six Marx Brothers? Can you name them?

Yes? There's Groucho, of course, and Chico. Harpo. Zeppo. Gummo. That's five. The sixth was a brother who died in infancy. He didn't live long enough to get a Blank-o name. He was named Manfred. Oh--and did you know that Chico is not pronounced "cheek-o"? It's actually pronounced "Chick-o"; because he had a thing for chasing the chicks. Really.

Do you know the difference between dungeon and dudgeon? It's worth looking up, though you will never, ever use the word "dudgeon" in a conversation. Or, at least not in any conversation worth having anyway.

I've also only ever met one other person who could not only pronounce, but use correctly, the phrase, "hoist by one's own petard." (He also happened to know that it came from Shakespeare, which is something that I hadn't known.)

Who--what American, I mean--is going to look at "Scylla" and think the c is pronounced like an s and the y is pronounced like an i? So the word is more like "Silla"? Who--what American, I mean--is going to launch right into "Charybdis" knowing that the ch is hard (as in "character") and here, the y is pronounced like an a, and that b is not silent (like it is in "dumb" or at the end of "bomb") so that Charybdis becomes "ka-rab-dis"?