To the Editor–
I feel compelled to defend the fine art of mispronunciation after reading William Greenway’s article (“Yeets and Kates,” September/October 1999). Any living language, even Greenway’s fictional mummy tongue, needs to be malleable. What the author proposes instead is to silence those not privileged enough to hear words of educated people in their own homes and schools; in effect, if you don’t know how to say facade, shut up or say “front.”
Hogwash. Poets, more than any other kind of writer, rely on word music in reading their work effectively aloud. If the poet has always thought that a certain word is pronounced in such-and-such a way, then that person should be free to say the word that way. What’s more, this whole idea of proper pronunciation, of poets bearing the capital-t Torch for the language, furthers the myth that poetry is some museum piece that living poets ape, that non-poets cannot touch.
I continue to be surprised by writers who adopt a standard middle class dialect (which is in fact a nonexistent, non-contraction-using pidgin that exists only on “Star Trek”) to get their work across in public. It’s nothing new: call it poetry’s Great American Genteel Insecurity Complex. Axe anyone teaching poetry in high school–the kids see right through it.
Writers should have the more faith in dialect, in character, in the sound of their own dialect; in short, in their living language than those of anyone else. And that means following the language where it goes. One needn’t go past than the O.E.D. to see how words have changed pronunciations over the years (adVERtizment).
Granted, there’s definitely room for correction here–and I would suggest a non-judgmental, polite method, as opposed to the upper-middle class sniggers. Purposeful mispronunciation will continue, despite Greenway’s protestations: dialects, regional names, and foreign phrases with different meanings in the English.
I wouldn’t trade the world for Bug Bunny’s mispronunciation of French phrases (koop duh grace), or poet Carol Frost’s New England pronunciation of haat for “heart.” I know what Bugs and Ms. Frost mean. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
There’s a great skit that was on Saturday Night Live a few years back, in which the Latino actor Jimmy Smits, playing a lawyer new to the firm a new employee at NBC, counters colleagues who over-pronounce Spanish terms such as burrrrrito and ta-CO to get street cred with their new Latino co-worker.
We could look at this skit as a send-up of what Greenway proposes.
Alas, in the world of poetry it’s already happened.
Daniel Nester
Brooklyn, NY
UPDATE: The video for the sketch mentioned here is nowhere to be found on the internets, but the transcript is posted here.Thanks to Robbie Q. Telfer for that.
