[ExI] commentary by one of ours

[spike]

> I had been reading words all my life and making assumptions about 
> their pronunciation, and had been caught out a few times. Most notably 
> by pronouncing gazebo in two syllables, which drew gales of laughter 
> from a room full of college students...

I do stuff like that intentionally, in order to draw gales of laughter.  It
helps to include some kind of clue that you did it intentionally.  This one
caught my attention because it is one of the words I intentionally
mispronounce for comic effect.  It isn't such a common word, so an example
is to emphasize it as gaaaaaazzzebo.

Another fun thing to do is find an archaic or obscure word to use for comic
effect around people who take themselves entirely too seriously.  For
instance in the office, one can bring in donuts and utter a comment such as
"There are treats over by the samovar."  Now of course people just get on
google and find out it means tea pot, so it doesn't work as well as it once
did.  But I recall several people loathe to admit they had no clue what is a
samovar.


> After so much of this kind of 
> thing, you tend to get gun shy about using words in conversation that 
> you're not used to pronouncing.  Darren

Like any other skill, the spoken word requires practice practice practice.
Recommend stretching exercises: try to speak in such a way that if someone
made a word for word transcript of your speech, it would make perfect sense
in written form.  Try to read a transcript of most conversations, oy vey.
Sentence fragments, jumpy subject, nothing that holds together well as a
paragraph.  So work on it!  Work hard!  Get rid of all fillers such as the
plethora of likes and you knows.  Or if you use fillers, have so many of
them that you never use the same ones twice.  So erudite will you sound, and
cause the proles to scramble for google to learn the definition of erudite
and prole.

spike