Intuition
Our local Quiznos has been shipping some poor soul out to the corner of the shopping plaza wearing a giant bean-shaped screen that screams “GET TOASTY” and every day I think I’m having a bad day at work or otherwise, I just think, seriously, I could be getting toasty right now on the corner of Pebblebrook Parkway and the 405. So shut up, just shut your toasty piehole, because life isn’t that bad. Not that I had a bad day today, because I didn’t, it’s just that it’s nice to know that the toasty man is there to remind me of how bad things could get. They could get toasty!
Although speaking of toasty, holy hell, it’s toasty as, well, a Quiznos sub at the moment, and my last walk with Sunny (where I half hobbled, being overly ambitious) was an endeavor in sweat, though that was likely due more to reasons related to the extended effort it takes to walk like a semi-normal person, although that did not stop my mulch-neighbor from hollering, “IS THAT YOU? SERIOUSLY IS THAT YOU?” I could only guess that I was supposed to be the “you” she was seeking, as confirmed when she approached and screeched, “What the hell is wrong with you? You’re walking like…like…Quazimoticus, I mean Quasi…Quasi…YOU KNOW.”
Quiznomoticus, maybe, would have been even better, to complete the toasty trifecta. Or bifecta. Or whatever.
This reminded me, by the way, of one of the pitfalls of being a written word person vs. an oral one. I mean, in the vocabulary sense, not the…whatever. Oral isn’t a dirty word, and yet…it is. It is! And once again I am reminded how utterly ridiculous it is that I will gleefully toss around the c-word like it’s water, but I am afraid to say perfectly normal every day words like ‘moist’ and ‘oral’ because they sound dirty. Because I am apparently from Victorian times, when women don’t show their ankles or use napkins. (OMG, napkins.)
Anyway, the written vs. oral thing has resulted in some very serious mispronunciations that make me cringe, such as clandestine. For the longest time, I thought that clandestine was pronounced “CLAN-destine” instead of the appropriate “Clan-DES-tine.” As in, I was probably close to 30 when I pieced that one together, after I actually mispronounced it in front of my parents who thought I was joking when I used it, like it was some kind of intentional mispronunciation or God forbid, a malaprop. Because, if you can believe it, it would appear that although I knew the correct spelling and usage of the word, no one in my life had apparently ever said it aloud, and neither had I. Although it’s more likely than not that I used it around other people who were either too polite or too amused to say otherwise, and that kind of gives me the oral heebs (um, oral heebs? My God.)
It is, however, a major improvement over the first time I did this, when I was 12 and kept saying “eppy-SKOP-al” to describe an Episcopal priest. Episcopalians, of course, were “Eppy-skop-ALIENS.” This revelation, by the way, was shocking enough to me that I remember it to this day, and I almost started crying at the clandestine conversation just thinking about it, and also, how many times have I done this in my adult life and had no idea? Many. I’m guessing many. And the humiliation isn’t over, of this I’m sure, given that I read a lot more than I talk, and mispronunciations lurk around the corner of every conversation.
“Homage” is another one I didn’t figure out until early-20s or so, and although for the life of me I can’t remember what I thought it was (“home-age” maybe, with a strong ‘h’ sound?) I do know that there wasn’t any oh-MAJZH bullshit coming out of my petite little lips. Wow, that was a bad phonetic attempt, but suffice it to say that I do, thankfully, know how to pronounce it now, and if I didn’t, Ilan uses it enough on Top Chef that you’d have to be dead not to pick up on it (though thankfully, I am not attempting a Kraft Italian dressing foam, and I’m not accenting quite in his snootypants way. And I’m wondering when he’s going to figure out that maybe having a girlfriend isn’t best for him, and perhaps he has a thing for Sam? Because everyone should have a thing for Sam. Because Sam is hot.)
This is a long way of saying, among other things, that people – and there are about 30 every day – who come here looking for the correct pronunciation of Jean Patou’s Fracas are really coming to the wrong place.
In other news, there is a wild frenzy here as we prepare for the visit from Schnozz, and that I am both excited and extremely nervous because I’m nerdy like that, and she might hear my snoring from two bedrooms over and write about it on the Internet. So here it is! A preemptive strike: I snore and I am not neat, and my favorite snack is peanut butter and apples, except I mix a little honey and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter into the peanut butter to smooth it out. And Schnozz is hot. It’s all out there, before it even happens.
And we’re still on Motrin and steroids, so it’s not like it’s a barrel of excitement ’round here. I hope you have a great Wednesday.
*Jewel, in honor of her American Idol guest appearance tonight (an homage! Sort of!) that confirmed that she may very well be among the top 5 of People I’d Most Like to Punch. And no, no I don’t own this song.
37 comments January 16th, 2007