The Most Mispronounced Word in the World

And how to undo decades of linguistic carnage

Photo by Nathaniel Shuman on Unsplash

Knowing or learning another language can be both a blessing and a curse. Don’t get me wrong — I think everyone should learn a foreign language, simply for the way it expands and enhances our perspective on the world, so don’t use the “curse” part as an excuse to avoid the challenge. Nevertheless, let me explain.

Trash talk at this LA bistro is apparently de rigueur. Photos courtesy of author.

Let’s start with the blessings, of which there are many. Sometimes it lets you in on an inside joke, such as the one in the film Grosse Pointe Blank, in which the French hit man (played by Benny Urquidez) sent to kill Martin Blank (John Cusack) is named Felix La Poubelle. In French, la poubelle means trash can, so the inside joke is that the hit man is basically Eurotrash.

Other times it simply lets you understand the meaning of things that others can only memorize blindly. I took four years of Latin in high school, which might seem absurdly bookish or impractical, but when you hit law school and realize just how many Latin terms and phrases are still in frequent use in the legal world, knowing Latin turns out to be one of the greatest assets ever.

Just a few of the Latin phrases you’ll need for law school.

The down side is that, over time, you become increasingly aware of — and sensitive about — proper pronunciation. For anyone who knows French, for example, hearing Texans use the word “bookoo” (rhymes with “you two,” and meaning “a lot”) is like fingernails scratching a chalkboard once you understand that it is a pejorative perversion of the French word beaucoup. (For illustration, “bookoo bucks” means that something is expensive.)

Place names are also an excruciating challenge. Hawai’i, for example, is properly three syllables, not two, and that little apostrophe is a glottal stop representing a suppressed k (which is why the word aliki, which means “(hereditary) noble” in Tuvalu, is ali’i in Hawai’ian). So no, Hawai’i doesn’t rhyme with “a sigh,” but rather with a “a psych key.” Conversely — and this one genuinely drives me nuts — the Japanese city of Kyoto is two syllables, not three, and every time I hear someone refer to something like the Kyoto Protocol, pronouncing Kyoto like it rhymes with “the oh toe,” well, it pretty much takes half a bottle of sake just to calm my nerves.

Beautiful Kyoto: lots of sights but still only two syllables.

Speaking of sake, the last syllable of that word rhymes with “kay,” not “key,” and the same is true of poke. Whenever I hear people say they had poke for lunch, and they pronounce it “pokey,” my first thought is one of horrified sadness — poor Gumby must be devastated.

The Campanile: I can’t “bear” to hear it mispronounced.

Along the same lines, the tall and beautiful clock tower that is at the heart of UC Berkeley’s campus is the Campanile, which is from Italian, so that last syllable should rhyme with “lay.” But Berkeley students and faculty alike keep pronouncing it as if it rhymes with “camp a kneel lee,” infuriating me to no end and leaving me no choice but to fail all of them (with the exception of one non-Italian colleague who agrees with me on the correct pronunciation). If they push a bit further in their quest for consonantal conniptions and head to the café in South Hall, which is located right next to the Campanile, and then order a non-existent drink they call “expresso” — for the love of humanity, there is no x in espresso — then I would have no other recourse than to pelt them with bologna (and if you pronounce that as “baloney,” I will be expressly compelled to douse you with espresso).

Personal names are also a mellifluous minefield for those who know proper pronunciation. On the one hand, when I had an Irish exchange student in my class named Caoimhe, she was absolutely delighted when I said her name as it should be (which incidentally is pronounced “keeva”). On the other hand, when I had a student of Indian heritage in one of my classes with the last name of Ubhayakar, he looked at me like I was a complete idiot when I pronounced it exactly as one would in India. The correct pronunciation rhymes with “ooh, buy a car.” His puzzled response to me, however, was “do you mean Ubhayakar?” (rhyming with “you baker”). As they say in Sanskrit, “wtf?”