"effeminate speech", 1801

[Mark A Mandel]

On Fri, 6 Jun 2003, Laurence Horn wrote:

#Actually, all the sources I found indicate it's PO- at l, with stress on
#the "POE".  So for my idiolect not quite like either Noel (rhymes
#with pole) Coward or the first No-WELL.  Of course, I could be wrong
#about Noel Coward--maybe he was bi(syllabic) himself.

I've heard -- can't cite, though -- that the first n times the BBC
mentioned Colin Powell they managed to get both his names wrong (by the
criterion that the owner of the name defines "right"):

Colin: He uses /o:/, "long O", as in Poe; they used reversed script a,
the rounded English "short O", as in pollen.

Powell: He uses /au/ as in power; they used "long O", making it PO- at l
/'po:@l/ as Larry describes above.

The latter indicates that that's the more common English pronunciation.
Is it just that we barbarian Westerners aren't familiar with it?

-- Mark A. Mandel