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My daughter, Heather, likes to torment me by sprinkling the following two terms throughout email messages:
‘forsure’
and
‘nevermind’
When I reply to the emails, I carefully put a space between ‘for’ and ‘sure’ and ‘never’ and ‘mind’. This does not help, because she does this to be cruel, she does it to get me. And she does a pretty good job of it, too. It has backfired, though, because she occasionally forgets, and uses the terms non-ironically, which is highly embarrassing for her. And that’s good, it will teach her a damn good lesson for trying to be smart with her mother.
Unfortunately, being smart with each other runs in my family. Apparently, back in another lifetime or so, my uncle, while an engineer student, loved to mispronounce words for the sole pleasure of driving my grandmother, a stickler about such things, around-the-bend crazy. He succeeded, but he played the game too often, and one day mispronounced a word while in the company of his peers, who then jeered at him. Good. Payback = a mother.
That was my mother’s side. My father wasn’t as bad about messing with words, but he was no saint. When I was a teenager, he informed me that real Hawaiian people pronounce their state ‘Havaki’, not ‘Hawaii’. He was so serious about this that I believed him, and went forth to inform everybody else of this enlightening bit of information. To say they were incredulous of my news is an understatement. All I can say is, thank god we didn’t actually go to Hawaii. Or Havaki.
When Heather was little, at that endearingly impressionable age when a child believes everything their mother tells them (read: is a sap), I went on mispronouncement-sprees. Heather was too wise by then to believe me when I told her chocolate milk came from brown cows but she sure wasn’t savvy enough to realize that ‘pedesTEERian’ is not actually how you pronounce the word ‘pedestrian’. I was doing her a favour, letting her learn the hard-knocks way that a) kids can be cruel when you mispronounce words, so you should be careful not to do it, and b) parents can be real bastards. She got the lesson, alright. I can tell, because all these years later she is still mercilessly playing payback with the ‘neverminds’ and ‘forsures’.
Word-smartaleckiness can be achieved in so many ways. Mispronunciation of words, deliberate misspellings, creation of brand new words, like ‘smartaleckiness’ or ‘naggification’, it’s all good. Or bad, depending on whether you get caught doing it in the wrong place, wrong time.
Photo: Contributed
Calling 9-1-1
“Hello 9-1-1? We have an EEmerGENcy here. You need to come, quick, like a bunNEE.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, did you say, ‘EEmerGENcy’? Could you repeat that, please?”
“It’s an EEmerGENcy . . . umm, you know, like a CATastroPHEE. We need an amBULEance. A pedesTEERian has been manGELLED by an auTOEMObile. It is kind of ridiCULEous that you haven’t already sent an ENtir squaDRON of EEmerGENcy vehiCULiar DEEVices by now.”
“HEY, now hold on there, are you makin’ fun of me?”
“Oh no way, honey . . . ain’t nobody got time for dat.”
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
