On Haitch-es and...maybe Mr. 'iggins?

Hullo. 'ullo?

Here's something from last week that may be interesting to some and may even bring a couple of laughs and/or raise some eyebrows - both the article and the video-clip. The boy on the right in the blue shirt reminds me of someone I know and the woman is priceless. The clip and the news story brought my own mongrel pronunciation home to me.

In the third school that I went to (and remember of) as a kid - I'm almost absolutely sure that "h" was pronounced "haitch". I used "haitch" in my head, dropped it after a point and then forgot all about it, and at some point I started raising my eyebrows when people said "Haitch" instead of "aitch". "H" is never pronounced in "history". This I learnt very late - sometime in middle-school. I always see the Wren and Martin when I read something to the effect of - "an historical examination of some of the theories demonstrate...wugga-wugga-wugga". Back then I'd chewed on the pencil and stared at the example on the left page of the book until I realised why the example used "an" instead of "a". (Even after "history" had been sorted out satisfactorily, I used an 'an' for "iron is a useful metal" for a class-test). How on earth is the pronunciation of "harass" changing though ? It can't be "arass"...!

I've got to say I don't remember ever hearing "ate" being pronounced as 'et'. Whoever's heard of "I et a biscuit?" Whoever says that apart from the very propah gentleman in the little clip? I can hallucinate "ate" rhyming with "bet" in "I 'et' an egg with toast" but I don't think I would ever say "et", and if I did I'd quickly correct it to ryhme with "bait". "Says", in my book, should rhyme with fez, and as the gentleman points out "there is no 'i' in mischievous" (between the v and the o, that is)! I'd have gotten all the pronunciations from 1928 incorrect apart from "pristine" (only because I know I used to pronounce it otherwise just a decade ago). I remember though a friend telling me in school that "house-wife" was actually pronounced "huzzif". I used that for a bit but I never could get used to it. And "cumbat"? It can't be "cumbat"! And why "respit"? Respite should rhyme with despite, shouldn't it?

I had assumed that "wrath" was pronounced the same way as "cloth"...But I'm not sure what "off" and "north" and "wharf" are supposed to rhyme with. Is there something missing in the sentence or is it me who's missing something.

I am reminded of my squabbles with Beth (a friend who is now a proper professor). She pronounced "soot" as rhyming with "foot" while I rhymed "soot" with "boot". I'm reminded of Bean who used to growl every time he heard someone say "or'njyoos". "It's not one word." He would say. "There are two words. Orange-juice." And then there was the little incident when a student from Greece told Bean, who was from the U.K, that Bean was mispronouncing words.

Grammar, pronunciation, spelling - at some point in school - became one garbled heap. I had a sense for idiomatic English and I had a sense for grammar - I'll give myself that....but for the latter - my senses weren't always right. I didn't know any grammar and I never did learn much of grammar while going to Carmel. I taught myself the fundamentals of grammar - including subject-verb agreement - when I was 24. I never quite understood punctuation or the phrase-and-clause bit...I still make subject-verb errors and dangling modifiers are sometimes left to dangle if I'm not carefully re-reading what I'm writing and re-writing, and I can't even quite spot the problem with the clause and phrase bit even when I sense that a sentence does not quite sound right.

And what of words which I didn't know how to pronounce? I simply pronounced them how I thought fit or "bleeped" over them, and went on reading. This reminds me of a lovely little cartoon that I found on the net but wasn't able to download. There's a boy who's snuggled up in his bed with a book, and he looks all comfy but he has a bemused look on his face, and he's looking up from his book. There is a blaring "announcement" from within the pages of the book: "Alert: you mispronounced a word in your head. Would you like to hear the correct pronunciation now or hear it later?"....

It would have been nice to to carry a pronunciation-perfect guide in the head even if one didn't have the luck to meet a Mr. Higgins everyday.

P.S: November 7th - and here's a link that Beth sent me....

Winter and Fall

With Giant Spruce. From Last Winter.

Last weekend the temperature was hovering at 36 degrees Celsius. And now it's dropped. It's some 3 degrees outside. It feels like winter has come. And I am not complaining about the weather. I love the cold even though I feel somewhat strange inside when the cold first descends. One winter, when my nose was freezing and tears, which had nothing to do with my emotional state, were streaming down my eyes and I had to give in and wait inside a building for a few seconds to get out of the wind, I still said out-loud, "I love winter."

I know that it's not really winter that's come. It's just the sudden and abrupt cold that's going to give way to some warmer and startlingly clear, crisp, and sunny days with the leaves changing colour but in my head it's already white and icy and snowy and windy...

The giant spruce outside my apartment died a couple of months ago. It was a stunted tree, people say. This time when the snows come I won't be staring at the miniature tree and pretend that I'm looking in on a snowy landscape with nothing but a giant blue spruce.

The sudden chill triggers off memories of a haunting story, one piece of music, of other times and other places and sometimes of other times and of the same place. I realised some days ago that I've been in this town for a long time, and have hardly left it. Considerably curious is that I never quite feel that I should visit other places because I still feel like a traveler or a visitor somehow. I've been to the airport about four times to drop off and pick up friends over these last some weeks, and every time I've been gently startled by the fact that there are other places and real people on this planet....

P.S: Over the last couple of days the leaves have started changing colour.

P.P.S: When winter really comes, this year - maybe, I'll put up a proper post on the season.