Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 24, 2010
I Swear ...
Can you say “Alzheimer’s”?
Vic Fleming
I have a letter from a law school classmate, Victra (Vicki) Fewell, that begins, “I am one of those weird people (like you) …,”
She could have stopped right there, couldn’t she? I mean, doesn’t that just about say it all?
Yeah, okay, I know it is out of context, so here is part of the rest:
“…weird people (like you) who struggles with when to use which and generally go with how it ‘feels’.”
She’s addressing the issue of when to use “awhile” and “a while,” about which I wrote so inexpertly a week or three ago.
“As an old English teacher,” Lawyer Fewell goes on, “I guess I should have analyzed it as thoroughly as you did. Your second and third examples make perfect sense to me. (Scary, huh?)”
(Yup, plenty scary. If you say so.)
“But I’d have to say that if one assumes a preposition in the first sentence you used as an?example, the?first guy was just as likely to have been ‘in bed (for) a while.’ Maybe there are some instances in which using either is correct.”
I’m lucky she was not MY English teacher!
But then she gets to the heart of her intended message:
“I sure wish you’d address my pet peeve: those who mispronounce ‘Alzheimer’s.’ The one with a Z is a neurological disease, and it is actually pronounced as if it had a T after the l, as in ‘alts-eimer’s’.”
She’s right about that. And her whole thread on this gave me a déjà vu feeling As though I had in fact written about this before. But I am having trouble remembering whether I did or not.
“I’m not a purist,” Vicki writes, “and would certainly settle for pronouncing it just the way it looks. However, Altheimer is a small town in Arkansas. That may be why so many Arkansans mispronounce the name of the disease.”
I have another theory. Although it comes from the state of my upbringing, Mississippi, I think it has application here across the Big Muddy.
My theory is called “Close Enough” and it applies in instances where certain people are taking on the pronunciation of words of more than a certain number of letters or syllables or when they are taking on a word with multiple high-Scrabble count letters.
“D’ju know Jed had a case of the pee-nu-monee-aye?”
“You mean pneumonia?”
“Close Enough!”
Victra Fewell’s note goes on: “As one friend who mispronounces Alzheimer’s says, ‘I wish people would get their pronounciation (sic) right’.
“Now that I’ve retired, I am more inclined to write in response to what I read. If this keeps up, I may soon be sending rants in response to the right-wing nut-columns and letters in the Demogogue.”
That last word in the preceding paragraph? I know she’d pronounce it “Demozette.” It has a couple of silent G’s and an unseen Z, and only a really good English teacher can take that one on.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.
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