Bill Gilmour came into the announcers' lounge, something between a walk-in closet and a telephone booth, and grabbed our attention. "Guys," he said, "I have found that the word 'garage' should be pronounced to rhyme with 'barrage'!'
We were amazed, because for years, we had been saying "gradge," as in, "Get the car outta the gradge."
Professionals that we were, we learned then to say "temperature" instead of "tempachurr," "interesting" rather than "innaresting," "engine" instead of "ingin," and "Wednesday" instead of "Wedunsday." We are still wrestling with "February," but then, who isn't?
And for those words or names that are really tough, like Aug San Suu Kyi and Jovan Olafioye, Bill had the solution: "Just flash your hand across your mouth," he said. "Listeners will say, 'Hear that, Irma? I think something went wrong with the radio'."
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This is a good Bill Gilmour story, but the very best one arose, I believe, from his keen desire to get off the evening shift. Would you be willing to reprise that one, with the out-of-the-body experience?
ReplyDeleteRegarding pronunciations, the CBC which of course has (or used to have) a middle management supervisor for everything, had "Supervisors of Broadcast Language" of whom the first was the urbane W. H. ("Steve") Brodie. Mr. Brodie periodically air-checked us all and, at a time of his choosing, confronted us individually with our air work. After admiring my verbatim recollection of the Anglican eucharistic liturgy (I had been an acolyte throughout my teens), he cautioned me not to "over enunciate." To illustrate, he advocated "offen" over "off-ten" and "uffishul" over "oh-fish-ul." "February" held no terrors for Steve Brodie. "Feb-roo-air-y" alone was acceptable. A pet peeve was (the widely heard) "Noo-kyoo-lar" in place of the correct "New-klee-ar." The music of spoken English, he told me, is the alternation of stressed syllables, clearly pronounced, and unstressed syllables with "reduced" vowels, uttered in a kind of cultured grunt.
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