Chile

Thu Oct 7 13:12:09 UTC 2010

My whole seventh-grade class was told by a junior high English teacher that
the "correct pronunciation" was indeed / kwIksot /.

Nobody could believe it, especially since he himself always said /kihoti/,
with the apology that he "knew it was wrong" but couldn't shake the habit.

He let us say it too, but since then I've felt guilty about it.

Number of other humans I've heard say /kwIksot/ since 1959:   0.

JL

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 9:05 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

> I cannot remember a time when the usual pronunciation among people I heard
> using the phrase (99.9% of them media people) was *not* "koo de grah."
>
> So it's been around - speaking conservatively - for at least thirty-five
> years, and in the most prestigious U.S. circles. (But perhaps the "blow of
> fat" is what they meant.)
>
> JL
>
>   On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 7:49 AM, David A. Daniel <dad at pokerwiz.com>wrote:
>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       "David A. Daniel" <dad at POKERWIZ.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: Chile
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> I posted on this earlier this year. Chile was Chilly in the USA until
>> sometime in the 80's when there was a surge of hypercorrect pronunciation
>> of
>> Spanish, at which time it became Chee-lay and the folks became
>> Chee-LAY-uns
>> instead of just Chillyuns. This culminated in 1990 with a hilarious skit
>> by
>> Jimmy Smits on SNL making fun of the whole over-pronunciation mania. It
>> wasn’t just Chile, of course, it was anything Spanish that happened to
>> come
>> up. The Smits skit tackled such things as En-shee-LAH-Thah and
>> Burrrrrrr-EE-Tho as well.
>>
>> Another foreign-language hypercorrection that I have watched become
>> popular
>> over the last 10 or 20 years or so is the substitution of Coup de Grace
>> (pronounced Grahss), which is the strike/blow of mercy, with Coup de Gras
>> (pronounced Grah) which of course is the Strike/Blow of Fat. I used to
>> hear
>> Coup de Grah occasionally, but now seem to hear it almost exclusively.
>> Apparently Americans think no French word ever has an ss sound on the end.
>> The Coup de Gras always gives me interesting mental images.
>> DAD
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf
>> Of
>> Paul Frank
>> Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2010 12:39 AM
>> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>> Subject: Re: Chile
>>
>> :      Re: Chile
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> ---
>>
>> As a native speaker of Chilean Spanish, this is something to which
>> I've paid close attention since my family left Chile a few terrifying
>> weeks after September 11 (1973, not 2001). In the 1980s, most
>> Americans I heard pronounce the word Chilean said "ChilAYan"; most
>> Brits said "Chillyin" (to borrow your spellings). I was living in the
>> UK and in East Asia at the time and hanging out with Brits and
>> Americans (and Chileans too). In the 1990s I began to notice ChilAYan
>> from British mouths, including BBC presenters. I'm less sure about
>> "Chilly" and "Chee Lay." I've always said "Chee Lay" or even "Chile"
>> (pronounced the Spanish way). Incidentally, one of my pet peeves in
>> the 1980s was the affected pronunciation in the middle of English
>> sentences of "Nicaragua" and "El Salvador" as if they were Spanish
>> words rather than perfectly good English words that ought to be
>> pronounced the English (or American) way. You sometimes hear this on
>> NPR: an American speaker pauses for a millisecond to pronounce some
>> Spanish place name or personal name as if she or he were speaking
>> Spanish. But I digress...
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Paul
>>
>> Paul Frank
>> Translator
>> German, French, Italian > English
>> Neuchâtel, Switzerland
>> Tel. +41 77 4096132
>> paulfrank at post.harvard.edu
>> paul.frank at bfs.admin.ch
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 3:21 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > Back in my day (1950s), "Chile" was pronounced like "Chilly."
>> >
>> > "Chilean" was pronounced as "chillyin." But since then "ChilAYan" has
>> become
>> > the media standard because it sounds more Spanishy. Sort of.
>> >
>> > Similarly "Chilly" has become the media "Chee Lay" because it sounds
>> more
>> > Spanishy.
>> >
>> > However, today I heard Tony Harris on CNN utter a new pronunciation that
>> > sounds like an American trying to sound Spanishy no matter what:
>> "ChillAY."
>> >
>> > Like _Ole_!
>> >
>> > JL
>> > --
>> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
>> truth."
>> >
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>> >
>>
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>
>
>
> --
>  "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
>

-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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