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Oct 10 2007

I nonironically like The Monkees.

posted by Seth in ,

Hell, I even went through a phase where I believed that (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone was a hidden jewel of “fuck you I’m going to do what I want” in the vein of Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down.

Not your steppin’ Stone! Not. Your. Steppin’. Stone.

(AH-ah-AH-ah-Ahhh.)

Listening to it again, I’m not sure I’m entirely over that phase…

Don’t you hate when your vocabulary is truncated by your inability to confidently pronounce words and phrases you toss about with wild abandon in your writing? There’s nothing that sticks quite so fiercely in the craw of a pedantic logophile than fumbling the pronunciation of a particularly juicy word. What’s more, you run the risk that another logophile will know the proper method for spitting out obsequious or lascivious or brobdingnagian and will, in a sickeningly smug voice, call you on it.

The deflating of your balloon of highbrow verbosity is never more poignant than that insufferably knowing “Don’t you mean ob-SEE-quee-us?”.

I avoid this potential humiliation by holding my tongue and scrambling for a synonym. Sometimes the (generally less juicy) synonyms come and sometimes I’m left to stammer out imprecise explanations of the word I meant to use. Such is life.

Whenever this happens to me, I scurry home and ask Leila if she knows how to say it, and she’ll say I think it’s pronounced this way and then I’ll say well I think that sounds weird and then she’ll go to howjsay.com and we’ll listen to a cultured sounding British guy say the word for our petty amusement. For the curious, yes, you can get him to say poop, penis, menage trois and anal sandwich. Well, okay, not the last one, but maybe if you had some free time and two tabs open…Well, the world is full of possibilities, innit it?

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