The Brain of Shawn

Corporate customer facing presentations are always fun to screw up.

I had my department head call me once and say:

“Kate, you have to redo the last slide on this training course.”
“Why?”
“Because you, uh, sorta, give up.”
“What?”
“Yeah, you’re going along fine, and all of a sudden, you get exasperated and just say, “Fuck. Whatever.”

Yeah.

How embarrassing. I thought I re-recorded after that little mess up, but apparently it either didn’t take, or I filed it away to be done again and never got back to it. It was a really long speech, like 3 minutes, and if you’re reading from a script, 3 minutes is like an eternity. Couple that with bad writing full of technical stuff, and your tongue tends to get twisted.

I make sure to double check everything now.

I much prefer it when regionalism is apparent. Can’t stand how homogenized ‘murican speech is getting.

BTW, did you redesign the comments page. It hurts a little. (weird contrast)

I always have fun trying to pick up on accents and regionalisms. Canadians are my favorite.

Having grown up with the generic West Coast American accent (with family influences from Iowa, Texas, Wyoming, and PBS) I’m intrigued with/by accents. Working at a university was the best - people from all over the world and all over the USA.

One day I looked in a physical oceanography class being taught by a Polish scientist. He was teaching students from Argentina, South Korea, Japan, and Illinois. English was a second or third language for four out the five people in the room, but they managed to work with each others accents. Still makes my brain hurt, thinking about the students and Ziggy figuring out each other’s versions of English.

I have terrible problems pronouncing things, but not, surprisingly, because of a regional accent. My father is from Baltimore, and my mom from, well, all over (A.F. brat). So I have almost no discernible regional accent unless I want to. (When I’m drunk is usually when my brain drags out the Southern WV accent.)

However, I’m an avid reader, and so my reading vocabulary is a LOT larger than my speaking vocabulary. Which means that I sometimes don’t know how to pronounce some relatively common words, if I’ve never seen them in both written/spoken context at the same time.

Funny thing, is that because I listen to a lot of public radio, I know to pronounce a lot of names/words that I can’t spell.

So I basically have a gap in my mind, where I know how to pronounce words, and I recognize/spell words, but those two mental files aren’t always linked. For instance, it was years before I realized that “military junta” and military hoonta were the same thing.

As far as names, strangely enough, if I take my time and can figure out their country of origin, I can sometimes suss out a close pronunciation.

Sometimes.

Reminds me of a middle school social studies teacher I had. He was very fond of saying “Yellow Huang He River” (where “Huang” was pronounced rhyming with “clang” and “He” was “Ho!”). “Yellow Hwang Ho! River!” he’d enthusiastically say. Huang in Mandarin is “yellow” and He is “river” so … “Yellow yellow river river.” :p

Of course on the flip side, one time I was on a plane next to a lovely couple that didn’t speak any English at all (the wife was very good at saying, very clearly, “I don’t speak any English!”). They said they were going to “Bah shing! tong.” (first tone, fourth tone, second tone, for John’s edification). It took me a good long while to figure out that they meant “Washington.” So it goes both ways.

That actually brings up a second issue I have. I speed read almost everything, so I tend to look at words as a whole rather than individual letters. Therefore I often rearrange the letters in the middle.

So it wasn’t until just now that I realized it is NOT spelled unbutu.

Which tells you how I would pronounce it, wrongly.

Both actually.