I yam what I yam

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I yam what I yam

By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Monday, December 7, 2009

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I got a startling call the other day from a telemarketer.

There’s nothing so startling about telemarketing calls – despite being on the “no-call” list, we get the odd call a couple of times a week.

I would like very much to yell at these callers that we’re on the no-call list, and threaten to report them to whatever authorities you report such scofflaws to. But the telemarketing calls we get now are always robots. The message usually starts out something like, “Please hold for an important business message.”

That’s adding insult to injury: First they call when they shouldn’t, then they ask me to hold! By then, I want to do more than yell at them and threaten them. I want to hunt them down like dogs, and teach them telephone etiquette with a shovel.

I’ve tried staying on the line, lurking through the recording, waiting in ambush for a real person to come on the line, so I can rage and vent (they have no idea who they’re messing with – a grandmother with a toddler and three loads of laundry a day).

Evidently they’re wise to me. No real person ever appears. There’s just recorded crap about the FBI reporting that some number of home are broken into every some number of minutes and blah blah blah. I think it has to do with selling me home security, I’m not sure. I usually slam the receiver before it’s done.

“Let them break in here,” I whisper to myself as I sort laundry while the grandboy asks me a million questions. “I’ve got a lot of laundry, a lot of pent-up hostility, and a shovel.”

Sorry. Back to the startling telemarketing call: It was startling because it was a real person.

I’m good at identifying people by their telephone voices. Years of practice, as a reporter. This man, I guessed, was young, East Indian, and somewhat despondent.

I was so startled to hear a human voice, I listened to him. And then, because he sounded a little despondent, I couldn’t rage or shout at him about being on the no-call list.

But I couldn’t help him, either. He was selling Internet access, which I acknowledged that our household uses, but then after the “save you money” speech, he used the phrase “dial-up.”

“Oh no, no, no,” I stopped him. “We have high-speed DSL, and we absolutely don’t want to use dial-up.” To myself I was thinking, “No wonder he sounds so despondent.”

“Please,” he said, in an urgent tone, “Allow me to explain. Our service provides you with an accelerator that will make the dial-up almost as fast as DSL.”

That’s when I laughed. I didn’t mean to, and I sincerely hope I didn’t push the poor man deeper into despondency. I believe he thought I laughed because I didn’t believe his accelerator would make dial-up almost as fast as DSL. I hope that’s what he thought. I told him abruptly I wasn’t interested, and hung up before I accidentally caused him to become suicidal.

What I was laughing at was his pronunciation of “accelerator.” Rather than ak-SELL-uh-rater, he pronounced it ASS-uh-luh-RATE-er.

I repeated his pronunciation to Micheal, who also enjoyed it, and to Sean, the eldest. I reminded him that when he joined the Navy just out of high school, the recruiting slogan was “Accelerate Your Life.” We both agreed that when he got out eight years later, he felt kind of ASS-uh-luh-rated.

We all enjoyed a laugh at the poor telemarketer’s expense, but in my case, it was one of those understanding, “better you than me” laughs.

As a child, I read voraciously. I read far, far beyond my grade level and ran across many unfamiliar words. Once in a while I had to look one up, but usually I could work out the meaning of a new word by its context.

It increased my vocabulary exponentially, and my spelling skills were awesome. But, like Popeye, my pernunskiation wasn’t always dead-on.

If I didn’t know how to say a word properly, I was at least smart enough not to use it until I A) looked it up or B) heard someone else say it. This method has its own drawbacks – I was in my teens before I learned that “facade” is pronounced “fuh-SAWD.” I had actually heard it spoken several times, but never connected it with the word I had read for years as “FACK-ade.”

Another word I had wrong for years was “candid.” I knew how to pronounce it, I just thought it meant the opposite of what it means. Remember the show, “Candid Camera”? I thought “candid” meant hidden, because that show always used hidden cameras. And when I read on some magazine cover that inside was a “candid interview” with some famous person, in an odd way, it sort of made sense the way I misunderstood it. It was a while before I caught on.

These days there are still pronunciations that disturb me. Pleasingly, they seem to disturb many others as well. The preferred pronunciation of Caribbean, you may be interested to know, is CARE-uh-BEE-un. But cuh-RIB-bee-un, which I prefer, is acceptable. You hear it both ways on the news and in movies.

The Weather Channel announcers have amused me for several years now with their widely assorted pronunciations of the Cape Verde Islands.

Those islands get mentioned a lot during the Atlantic hurricane season, because they’re just off the coast of Africa and in the path of the waves that come off that continent and often turn into hurricanes as they come our way.

Some of the meteorologists call it Cape VUR-dee. Some say Cape VAIRD. Some say Cape VURD, which the English dictionary says is correct. But Portuguese is spoken on Cape Verde, and in that language it is Cabo Verde, and the “e” in Verde is pronounced, and it sounds like VAIR-day.

Every time meteorologists on The Weather Channel start their dueling pronunciations of those poor islands, I am reminded of an incident that occurred in a tony French restaurant in NYC on a weekend trip there with a friend years ago.

The waiter spoke French and English and had that superior attitude waiters at posh restaurants often suffer from. My friend Julie, who taught French and English, urged me to order in French. I wanted cold poached salmon, and she instructed me in the correct way to pronounce saumon froid poche, but when I got to the sauce verte, I tripped up and pronounced it the way it would be in Spanish – ver-TAY.