You say Bayzul, I Say Basil

I have a great admiration for football commentators, especially Matt Dunigan, who recently was dubbed "patron saint of concussed quarterbacks."  But I do have to throw a flag on the subject of mispronunciation:  15 yards for every announcer who continues to pronounce "route" as though it rhymes with lout, tout, shout and snout.

Route, in football parlance, is what the receiver runs to catch the ball.  Fine.  But it is "route," rhyming with toot, boot, hoot and loot.  How about root?  There's something for football commentators to lock into their memory banks.  Route is root, as in root for the home team.  (Not that they would do that, for that would make them homers, which is a topic for another day.)  "Rout," which does rhyme with shout, etc., is what happens when one team crushes another by 34 points.

Okay, now that the pronunciation curmudgeon is fired up, here's another complaint:  all the Food Network hosts (including the great Bobby Flay, but I can forgive him anything) who pronounce "basil" as "bayzul."  Anyone who ever watched "Fawlty Towers" knows that basil rhymes with dazzle, not hazel. 

The CBC used to have an invaluable man who daily would issue pronunciation guides for on-air personnel.  Apparently such a position no longer exists.  There was a long period when CBC announcers would do serious damage to their necks attempting to pronounce "Bach" as something like "Bawh-khh."  They did not, however, try to get "Van Gogh" right, which, properly pronounced, sounds like someone with a serious case of catarrh clearing his throat.

I worked for many years with an announcer whose pronunciation was flawless in several languages.  At a time when the men's fashion line Gino Paoli was popular, he insisted on saying "Powli" rather than "Pay-o-lee," which was then the accepted reading, payola being something radio announcers understood.

Getting out of here now.  But I must pass on my favorite turn on pronunciation questions.

This, we're told, was scribbled on a wall of the Yale music school, where the subject under discussion was Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana":

You say Carmeena, I say Carmyna

You say Buranna, I say Burayna

Carmeena, Carmyna,

Buranna, Burayna--

Aw, let's call the whole thing Orff.