Nevaddans Who Talk Good and Rite Gooder
The language police has just made another false arrest, of the kind you might expect to see on Reno 911. Via Boifromtroy comes this Ass. Press story which appeared in the Las Vegas Sun, and which takes President Bush to task for pronouncing Nevada the Spanish way. Apparently, that’s a no-no in that state, right up there with pronouncing Oregon “aura gone” rather than the preferred “organ.” [Note, however, that both pronunciations of Nevada are listed in the dictionary.] Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one’s perspective, the Sun article does a fine job of reminding us of what they say about people living in glass houses, and why. For starters, get a load of the headline:
Bush mispronunces Nevada in first presidential visit
First of all, the President didn’t “mispronunce” Nevada; he merely (mis-?)pronounced its name. Thus, the word Nevada should either be in italics or surrounded by quotation marks. This is, I believe, one of the rare occasions where even Patterico will concede that the use of quotation marks is acceptable. Second, having established that the Sun thinks “pronunce” is a verb, I suppose we can at least take some comfort knowing that unlike many people, they’ll at least get the nominalization, pronunciation, right. Right? Wrong. Here’s the very first sentence of the article itself:
Nevada memo to George Bush: When making a first presidential visit to a state, use the right pronounciation of its name.
[Emphasis added.]
OK, time to move on. No more carping over how to pronounce a pronunciation, pronunce a pronounciation, or any of that stuff. We got your point: don’t say “ne vah-dah.” So what should we say instead?
To properly pronounce Nevada, the middle syllable should rhyme with gamble.
Really? Maybe it’s just me, but for all the times I’ve been to Reno, Lake Tahoe and Las Vegas, I have yet to meet a single Nevadan who pronounce the name of his state “Nevambleda.”
UPDATE: Now they’re running a second version of the article, which fixes the headline but leaves all the other moron-mistakes intact.
UPDATE x2: Yup, they fixed the headline in the original version, as well. All of the Ass. Press’s errors are still there, however. Below is a screen shot of the original version.
UPDATE: Boifromtroy notes in a comment that Daily Monopolist Patt Morrison has repeated the Nevambleda meme in today’s paper.
November 26th, 2003 at 3:16 pm
Effing hilarious! I was out the door of my office, but HAVE to post a link to this.
November 26th, 2003 at 3:40 pm
Bush also mispronounces “New Yawk” and “Bahston.”
November 26th, 2003 at 4:11 pm
I saw the same think and when it said rhyme with gamble, I was like…uh…that makes no sense. Hilarious Xrlq.
November 26th, 2003 at 4:34 pm
What, our governor can’t even pronounce the name of the state he was elected in: Caleeefoneeea
November 26th, 2003 at 5:34 pm
I’ll bet he botches Norleans and Louville, too.
November 26th, 2003 at 8:14 pm
As long as he gets the two main cities right – Keno and Lost Wages.
November 28th, 2003 at 4:30 am
Don’t forget that Bush mispronounces “Chicahgo”.
He also must mispronounce the state of which his brother is governor; many of my neighbors called our state “Flahrida”.
November 28th, 2003 at 6:20 am
I bet he mispronounces Balmer, too, and it’s only 30 miles from the White House.
November 30th, 2003 at 11:30 am
“Even” Patterico?
November 30th, 2003 at 11:39 am
I would never try to throw the discussion off track with an observation about grammar, but the post is largely a discussion about grammar anyway, so: note that the Ass. Press splits an infinitive in discussing how “[t]o properly pronounce Nevada”. . .
In my view, that’s about the only thing the AP gets right in the story. Sometimes you have to split those infinitives to properly convey your meaning, no?
November 30th, 2003 at 12:02 pm
I blogged about split “infinitives” almost a year ago. They aren’t really infinitives; bare verbs are. I have no opinion as to whether it’s OK or not to split to-constructions. Perhaps due in part to my training in linguistics (I was ABD in that area before I jetted off to law school), I’m with the “descriptivists” on this one: there’s nothing inherently “right” or “wrong” about it, only rules that are/aren’t descriptively accurate as to how people do talk.
That is emphatically not the case with written language. Written language is not natural language, and thus cannot survive on descriptivism alone. To keep the artificial language working, we need artificial norms. Thus, we can and should be “prescriptivist” when it comes to proper spelling, punctuation, etc., or we’ll end up with a written language that is totally incomprehensible. We do not need to impose new grammatical rules on written language, however; if it’s OK to say “to boldly go…,” then it should be OK to to write that, as well.
That said, I can think of very few situations in which one could not get by without splitting an “infinitive,” were one so inclined. This instance is no exception; “to pronounce Nevada properly…” would have sounded just as good to me, if not slightly better.
November 30th, 2003 at 1:42 pm
Why does Nevada have to be in quotes – isn’t it synecdoche or metonomy or whatever?
November 30th, 2003 at 2:41 pm
No, synecdoches and metonomy both apply to figures of speech, like calling Las Vegas “Sin City.” This is a matter of using a word vs. talking about the word. Consider these possible headlines:
Bush Butchers Nevada
Bush Butchers “Nevada”
To me, the first headline suggests that President Bush did something horrible to the state of Nevada, while the second makes it clear that what he butchered was the name of the state – as he would have done if he had called it “Nevambleda.”
November 30th, 2003 at 2:48 pm
I wonder if the Sun ever pointed out that the Kennedys mispronounced “Nevader”.
November 30th, 2003 at 3:09 pm
“Sin City” — what a great song.
November 30th, 2003 at 7:09 pm
I’m a New Yorker who lived for two years in Nevada. Yes, Bush’s Ne-VAH-da (long A) pronunciation differs from the natives’ Ne-VA-da (short A). But then, almost *everyone* outside the state pronounces it Bush’s way. If Bush “made a mistake,” put him in the same boat as 275 million other Americans.
Similar thing with Nevada’s northwestern neighbor. Natives say ORE-gin (hard G), while everyone else says Ore-GONE.
December 1st, 2003 at 11:24 am
Patt Morrisson repeats the LV Sun rhyming line in today’s L.A. Times…
December 1st, 2003 at 12:28 pm
The notion that only the locals can define the correct pronunciation of local words is parochial. When local words are used routinely, they become contracted, simply as a matter of convenience. Where I grew up (eastern Massachusetts – about as far east as you can get without drowning) they are contracted past the point of incomprehensibility. It would hardly be sensible to expect non-locals to duplicate the eccentric local lingo. Now if the President happened to be on an undercover mission and was trying to blend in with the local crowd, he could be castigated for failing to get the local twang just right. But otherwise, it would be inappropriate for him to try. During the Falklands unpleasantness, the TV talking heads tried to pronounce “Buenos Aires” as if they were Argentines – with predictably hilarious results. Yet they would never dream of trying to pronounce Paris or Moscow or Tokyo as they are rendered in French or Russian or Japanese….although the comic value, should they try, should not be taken lightly.
December 1st, 2003 at 3:32 pm
Your comments about the pronunciation of Nevada are entirely correct, but they would sound more authoritative if you could avoid glitches such as “…the use of quotation marks are acceptable.”
December 1st, 2003 at 3:50 pm
Doh. Fixed.
December 3rd, 2003 at 9:40 am
Moscow = “mahsk VAH”, which doesn’t have any difficult phonemes. It’s words like Gorbachev or Khrushchev and patronymics that might be difficult. As for “Nevada,” I’ve heard it, and probably pronounced it, both ways both inside and outside of the state, and I probably never noticed it.
December 3rd, 2003 at 7:36 pm
Now I am so looking forward to a presidential visit to Scotland, especially to the north east, hoping above all that he [or she !] will address the natives in either Portnockie, Banffshire [which the locals pronounce "Finn-echty"] or Aberchirder, Aberdeenshire [pronounced "Abber-hirder" by some, but "Fogie-loan" by most locals].
God knows why it should be thus, but, since He [or She !] has not deigned to visit either town in ages we may never know.
November 26th, 2003 at 3:41 pm
Learn how to say it yourself, stupid!
Folks in Nevada are upset that Bush supposedly mispronounced the state’s name. Several Bearflaggers have already picked this up, including Ith, BoiFromTroy and xrlq. Maybe the folks in Nevada should go back to school. Nevada is a Spanish name roughly…
November 26th, 2003 at 3:47 pm
You say Nevada, I say Nevada
Both PoliBlog and Xrlq take note of this bizarre AP story that alleges that Bush mispronounced the name of the state of Nevada: Bush, in…
November 26th, 2003 at 3:55 pm
Silly
This is just silly. They have nothing better to do than pick on the President because they say he pronounced
November 26th, 2003 at 8:11 pm
It’s pronunced “Nevambleda” you idiot!
(Review) No, the title above isn’t a typo. Xrlq hilariously takes the Las Vegas Sun sun to task for their article complaining that President Bush–that moron–mispronounces the state name as neh-VAH-dah instead of neh-VAD-uh. Actualy, the Sun wites tha…
November 26th, 2003 at 10:00 pm
Can You Say Nevada?
President Bush went to Nevada. Some Nevada newspaper Las Vegas Sun pronounced that President Bush is a dummy because he did not pronounce the word for the state in the preferred manner of the newspaper. Now I am from out
November 30th, 2003 at 11:51 am
SPLITTING INFINITIVES
Xrlq’s excellent post on an error-laden Ass. Press story got me thinking about split infinitives. I noticed that the AP story in question split an infinitive, and I thought that it was about the only thing in the story that the AP got right. I think th…
December 1st, 2003 at 11:16 am
New L.A. group blog
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December 2nd, 2003 at 8:07 pm
Submitted for Your Approval
First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here, and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  here are all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for this week’s vote. Council links:Gratitud…
December 4th, 2003 at 8:39 pm
The Council Has Spoken!
First off…  any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here, and here.  Die spambots, die!  And now…  the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are President Bush Visits Iraq by Alpha Patriot, …
January 24th, 2004 at 12:10 pm
Conservatives mispronounce ‘gamble’
That’s the only way I can figure it, after reading Patt Morrison’s Column in the L.A. Times this morning, where she reports: “Here, even the governor pronounces the state’s name idiosyncratically. But while President Bush raised a lot of money…
January 24th, 2004 at 12:26 pm
Hypothesis: Bloggers are Weird
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January 24th, 2004 at 4:09 pm
You say Nevada, I say Nevada
I am still trying to figure out this story. Apparently President Bush mispronounced the word “Nevada” while on a visit to Las Vegas…”and therefore, he must be stupid,” is the implication. If that’s so, then I must also be stoopid…
January 30th, 2004 at 9:00 pm
SPLITTING INFINITIVES
Xrlq’s excellent post on an error-laden Ass. Press story got me thinking about split infinitives. I noticed that the AP story in question split an infinitive, and I thought that it was about the only thing in the story that…
March 9th, 2004 at 6:15 am
Weasel Winners
A belated post linking to the November 6th results will be accepted if it also links to all entries…
March 9th, 2004 at 6:19 am
Weasel Winners
A belated post linking to the November 6th results will be accepted if it also links to all entries…
March 9th, 2004 at 6:25 am
Weasel Winners
A belated post linking to the November 6th results will be accepted if it also links to all entries…
March 9th, 2004 at 6:28 am
Weasel Winners
A belated post linking to the November 6th results will be accepted if it also links to all entries…
March 9th, 2004 at 6:34 am
Weasel Winners
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August 31st, 2004 at 1:00 am
Nightmare Scenario in California?
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