Harmony ,'Help'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
from a friend of mine re: McCain -
"But as of 10 o'clock this morning, he was STILL in NY campaigning, while Congress is finishing drafting the bipartisan plan, and his only commitment to be in DC is for a photo-op at the White House later this afternoon. Said Barney Frank, “We’re trying to rescue the economy, not the McCain campaign.”
Burn.
I went to Subway for lunch and instantly fell into a junk food stupor. Cannot focus...must nap...
To go back a bit, the last thing that made me smile was when at the bookstore last night, I was calling the special orders we had received. I got to a stack of archy and Mehitabel books for a customer named "Richard Schingoethe." Now, when I call someone, I like to ask for the person using their full name, so I took a few minutes to figure out how to pronounce it. I knew that the author Goethe was pronounced "Grr-tuh," so I figured this name would "Shin-Grr-Tuh," and dialed and asked for him with that pronunciation.
There was a rather prolonged silence, then "Oh. My. God." I started laughing and said, "So, I got it right then?" His response was that he doesn't even pronounce it that way anymore because of all of the mangling it goes through, and has anglicized it to "Shin-Go-Thee." He then assumed I knew German a bit, which I let him believe instead of telling him I was just a book geek who knows my international authors.
Kathy, that's like the time I was doing phone support and getting lots of calls from Cajun country. I very rarely had trouble pronouncing the French names properly because I spent several years doing TV new monitoring from New Orleans. It was easier to just say I'd spent some time in New Orleans. Thanks to Hubby, who grew up in Hawaii, I could also pronounce Hawaiian names, much to the locals' delight. When I told them my husband grew up in Hawaii, they always wanted to know where he'd lived and tried to find out if there were people in common that they knew.
My Sunday school teacher LOOOVED me because as a 6 year old, I pronounced her name correctly without being told -- Jock(w)aLEEN, not Jack-lyn.
She thought I was a supergenius, and gave me presents!
After working at Waldenbooks near Little Warsaw on the NW border of the city, not too far from Belmont/Central, I got really good at figuring out how to pronounce Polish last names (it's just a matter of sounding out every single syllable). Then, when I moved up here and found out that this is where the Polish immigrants go when they can afford to move out of their city apartments and head to the 'burbs, I've been able to keep up my pronunciation practice. I now have Russian names to figure out, as well.
Russian is fun. We've been watching Russian musicals on public broadcasting channel, and it's amazing how many French sounds are in Russian.
